Excerpt from: 
The Pune Diaries - from Anand Subhuti

Pune Diary 37: India’s favourite cult

Crystal has big plans. He’s renting motorbikes and setting up a tour.  “We start in Pune and head east to a town nobody’s heard of,” he tells me. “From then on, we’re off the highway and on the back roads. No trucks. We head on down to Hampi, then to Goa, chill at the beach for a few days, then back here – two weeks, all inclusive.”

He wants me to come. “I’ve been thinking of you,” he confides. “What if we take you along and you teach us the Enneagram at the stops? You know, mix in a little meditation and awareness as part of the package.”

It’s a tempting offer, but comes a little late – at least for this trip. They’re leaving in three days and I have a backlog of work for clients. Maybe next year.

Meanwhile, Crystal has lined up nine Royal Enfield motorbikes, mostly the classic Bullet 350cc model, but with a Thunderbird and other variations thrown in. He’s got guys flying in from Germany to take part in the tour, plus a skilled mechanic who’ll be riding with them.

Puffing on a beedi in the Plaza smoking temple, Crystal has come a long way since holding down a job as senior vice president in an investment corporation. He dropped out, discovered Osho, found himself a lovely girlfriend and has been riding Enfields for years. Now he wants to share his passion with others.
 

I understand his enthusiasm for this machine. It’s really the tour bike par excellence for India, with its wide, super-comfy seat, stable road holding capacity and reassuring ‘doom…doom…doom’ thumping sound of its engine as you cruise from town to town.

A few years back, I rode one of these monsters for 21 days through the Himalayas, with Ash and Deepesh, the Riding High Tours specialists.

Deepesh was a real cowboy. He could ride like the wind and once drove nonstop from Leh to Manali – usually a two or three day journey – just to take the sleeper bus to Delhi with a new girlfriend as she headed back to Holland. They’d met on the road in the mountains, leading Enfield tours in opposite directions. When they took their helmets off, it was love at first sight.

When I heard Deepesh was dead, I felt sure he’d flown off a mountain-side in Spiti Valley or Ladakh. Imagine my surprise when I learned he died from an asthma attack at his home in Brazil. I don’t know if they buried his motorbike along with him, but they should have.

Royal Enfield was a British motorbike firm that began production in 1901 and then, in the 1950s, set up a subsidiary company in Madras (now Chennai), mainly to supply the Indian Army with a sturdy machine for patrolling the country’s wild and endless borders.

The Army’s first request was for 800 Bullets, a huge order at the time. Since Pune continues to be an army town – headquarters of Southern Command – you still see green-painted Enfields driven by soldiers, chugging around the town’s Camp area.

In 1968, the parent company in England went out of business, but the subsidiary in Chennai thrived and gradually more and more people – Indians and tourists alike – came to love the bike’s power and style.

Now there are dozens of Enfield clubs throughout India and many tour operators regularly take visitors on extensive rides through all kinds of terrain. When I toured with Ash and Deepesh, we were riding mainly above 3000 metres and crossing passes at 5000 metres. The bikes were fine with everything they had to deal with, including ploughing through a freak snowstorm, fording rivers and passing army convoys on mountains.

I still remember, with a glow of pleasure, cruising with Ash and Deepesh into Leh, wearing my super-expensive Oakley goggles and acknowledging the admiring glances of ordinary tourists as we passed them in one long, throbbing line of motorbikes… the height of Enfield cool.

Royal Enfield is now the oldest motorcycle brand in the world still in production, with the Bullet model enjoying the longest motorcycle production run of all time. Success is due to the bike’s ‘cult’ image, meaning that it’s become ‘the thing’ to ride one as part of ‘the Indian experience’. Exports to other countries are also booming.

Two weeks later, Crystal is back in Pune with a happy, suntanned crew of bikers, including several glamorous women who accompanied them. No accidents and no mechanical failures. He’s all fired up for doing it again next winter. Maybe I’ll go with him.

Not sure about the Enneagram mobile workshop, though. After all, how does a Seven ride an Enfield? Or a Four? Have to think about it….