"Home Delivery"

I was to go to Mumbai for an urgent personal commitment this weekend and I moved off on Thursday night itself. I landed in Mumbai early Friday morning and for the first time the city actually appealed to me with it open skies, wide traffic less roads and no people hustling and bustling. But the whole scenario changed in a few minutes as daylight arrived and the city suddenly started swarming like a horde of ants.

Thank god I am no longer in this city. One big thing I was supposed to do this weekend was to pick up fellow rider Kedar's bike form Mumbai and deliver it to him in Pune. I carried my helmet along for this journey and was ready to ride back with the bike. Well at Bike Nomads we just introduced this new facility of "Home Delivery" of the motorcycle. This was perhaps the first one amongst these kinds of services. Kedar, a fellow Biker who had disposed off his Karizma was without a bike for quite some time and wanted to bring back his motorcycle which was lying in Mumbai. A week earlier he had got the bike rescued from a huge water logged area and got the same delivered to the service center for repairs.

I picked up the bike form the mechanic Reddy's and test rode the same for a short distance to understand the niggling issues. Being a Non-Bajaj rider i have always wondered what kind of bikes these pulsars must have been. I always looked at the classic pulsar as an overgrown caliber. I sat on the bike and started it. The slightly de-tuned CDI was responsible for the back-kick the bike was generating. I am luckily used to stronger and harder back-kicks having ridden Bulls and Yezdis for 15 years so i could manage it. The bike roared into life but kept dying as soon as i left the throttle. A short ride told me that the gearshift mechanism was an all-down shit and i made the mistake of moving back into neutral every time i took off as i was used to a 1 down rest 4 up mechanism and i always ended up getting into first gear. Rolling for some time and then shifting back into neutral.

After some adjustments i rode back home in the evening and prepared myself for an early morning ride. My friend Jude accompanied me for this Mumbai Pune ride and we left Mumbai early morning around 7:30ish. I started off with re-setting the trip meter. A short fuel stop for downing 400 bucks worth of fuel and soon we were moving towards Vashi. The customary break at Datta Vada Paav guy at Panvel revealed that the Speedo was not functioning and so was the odometer. The first set of glitches on the done up bike. The speedometer showed a distance of 32 kms while we had covered 45 already. Jude also informed about a Speedo error which showed us at 80 something while the bike next to us was way beyond 90. Maybe the Speedo needed to be recalibrated again. We set off on the highway towards khopoli and it was here that i started finding some issues with the chain sprocket assembly which made the bike wobble once in a while. the tyres were brand new hence the question of the wobble because of tyres with poor tread wasn't there. The road surface was wet but the bike was able to take curves even at quite prominent bank angles without showing any signs of instability.

As we neared the ghat section after Khopoli, we saw couple of more bikers, surprisingly without any protective gear zooming off. I also remembered a small news item in the local newspaper about a lot of accidents happening on pulsars. Wonder whether it is because the motorcycle is probably the most popular motorcycle around or perhaps the bike actually is rather difficult to control and has too much power to handle. Anyways not allowing such thoughts to trouble me anymore i started climbing. This old bike still had a lot of grunt in it despite carrying two grown ups and some load as a large backpack it was doing good speed. I noticed the presence of false neutrals (also called fool's neutral) many times out here. Some of my friends have told me it’s an inherent Bajaj problem and one has to live with it. I don’t think so its such a difficult thing to manage, one just has to be doubly sure as to having tapped the gear shift lever hard enough to make it move that extra mm to engage properly. We took a short breather at the top of the ghat section and spotted a set of thumpers there. The group of 4 guys was circled around one of the Bulls trying to figure out what could have gone wrong. I tried to help but then i guess they were all trying to figure out the issue them selves so i didn’t bother them much.

After some introspection; i have a bad habit of thinking on the futility of existence whenever i stand at such places and peer over the horizon, we left in some time. The importance of life came to me as soon as i came way too close to a truck which was not sure which way to go to while climbing the ghats. We managed to reach lonavala after negotiating a traffic jam on the expressway and reached in time to grab a quick bite and the filter coffee there at RK. From there the road ahead was oh so smooth with us zooming on at real breakneck speeds now that the bike had also warmed enough towards Kamshet. It was here that we were overtaken by two black streaking machines. Pulsar 200's they were and were being ridden like crazy. The guys dressed in real good biking gear and scraping pegs took curves with style and panache. I tried following but those guys were way too fast for me. The ride form Kamshet up to dehu road was also exciting as a couple of more bikers tried racing with me. I somehow couldn’t tell them that i was simply going fast because i had to meet up with a friend (hitanshu) at Pune and not because i wanted to show them what an old pulsar can do which a new one cant. Lekin ye loag sudharenge hi nahi!!

Anyways i reached my home at about 11:00 AM and got a call from Praveen Shirali enquiring my where about. Luckily i was already home so we met up. Had tea - Courtesy his mom. It’s like an extension to his family. I stay next door and hence has been benefiting from his benevolence ever since i moved in. BN family Rocks!! I spent some moments chatting up with Hits and then test riding Praveen Shirali and Arpan's bikes. Hits left soon after than and Kedar arrived to pick up his bike. He was oh so overjoyed to finally get his set of wheels. Poor guy has now downgraded way too much from a Pulsar 180 DTSi to Karizma and now down to the Pulsar 150 Classic. He rode the bike for some time and could identify with the few small glitches i had pointed out. Somehow it’s not essential to have a bike which runs perfectly but it definitely is essential to know each and everyone of the small glitches of the bike. We had lunch and then took the bike for a good wash. I took Kris along as it had been quite some time since i last washed my bikes. Once clean from the dirt gathered during the run the pulsar also shone and Kedar pushed off towards his home. Thus ended the epic journey which was perhaps one of the few "HOME DELIVERY" runs for a motorcycle. For the delivery man at the end of the day - A Happy Delighted customer - is all that he wants. And that’s exactly what Kedar felt as he was again on two wheels after a long time.

Photographs of this ride