Give A Chance To The Bike Companies

The way most bike companies are treating their customers in respect of the availability of spare parts is most execrable. In my own case, it was the Hero Honda Karizma some time ago, which I sold only because I was tired of waiting for weeks on end to get some important spare part. Now my Bajaj Discover 125 has been lying idle for the past two months because the authorised Bajaj showroom/workshop at Bhuntar (Knllu), Himachal Pradesh, is not able to deliver a simple spare part.

Please introduce a new rubric in your letter column, where we can report such things as short messages to you and even give a chance to the bike companies to reply/ explain why the customer is let down.

Touching upon another germinal issue, I also wish that the directors/managers of two-wheeler manufacturing companies would leave their cosy offices once in a while and ride pillion on one of their own fancy creations for two hours at a stretch on an average bumpy rural road. Maybe, they would then realise that comfort has to take priority over style. Is it not idiotic that every day millions of pinion riders have to suffer the torture of those so-called seats just because manufacturers are so much obsessed with style? And, ironically, the costlier the bike, the more uncomfortable becomes the pillion seat (barring the Avenger and, of course, the good old Bullet). As for style, it should come after quality and comfort.

Incidentally, my hero is our biker who rode on his old Bajaj M80 to Leh/Ladakh. Thanks for that touching article in the December 2011 issue of your magazine. It reminded me of my own all-India tours astride an M8a long ago. My favourite travel writer, Bin Aitken, did his first trip to Ladakh on an old Rajdoor motorcycle. Kudos to all those bikers with low budget, who do not care about style and fancy bikes, but enjoy their ride wherever they go.