In 2014, while walking around the docks at Mangalore, where every truck seemed to be an Ashok Leyland and every motorcycle a Royal Enfield, I stumbled across a man sitting in the dust of the road in front of the open mouth of a tipper lorry. Surrounded by the carcass of a gearbox and with taper roller bearings laid neatly on rags by his side, he was rebuilding the machine’s drive train - as vehicles trundled past kicking up a fog of yellow ochre. “He is very strong man”, announced a portly suited gent standing over him.
I love my Royal Enfield and for the price it’s a great bike. But I’m not deceived into thinking that the marque is comparable to other modern incarnations of the classic genre. To the visitor, India is a wonderful, unique, sometimes baffling, explosion of new and old. It has aircraft carriers and a space agency, but also a population with expectations decades behind our own. And people prepared to fix things at the side of the road.
