Moping Redux

How are fat girls and mopeds alike? They're both fun to ride until your friends find out. So goes a college joke but on a serious note the joys of moped riding ( or what I call Moping) on congested city riding dawned upon me in recent years and it was more by chance than design.

A decade or so back, I had sold my one & only two wheeler; a veritable Hero Honda CD 100 (in pic below) and had switched over to a car since . That Bike had been steadfast with me through my college days & early job period. A staid & steady Japanese bike of 1985 make it was among those types which were initially assembled in India. This bike took enough beating under my driving so much so that it had to suffer one major heart transplant (i mean engine reboring) during its tenure.

But about 11 years back I replaced it with a Indica V2 to take up my commuting needs & followed it up with Santro Xing in 2003. Thereafter my driving routine changed , and I resigned myself to the dull & drab driving of city car commuting. Then one day this happened, I had to go somewhere & the car was at the service centre. So invariably I turned my sight on this lean machine. At first sight it did not please me, a small fragile frame & hoi polloi looks put me off but the commuting majboori of the moment made me to ignore all that & give it a try. And lo! behold before I could try more expletives, the moped was revving smartly through bangalore’s congested roads.


Einsteins theory on the relative motion of bodies struck me hard when I realized my relatively better new found acceleration . Commuting through the dense Bangalore traffic like a hot knife wading through the butter, it made driving a breeze and I reached my destination much faster . So life suddenly seemed to be on the faster lane, relatively speaking that is .

This TVS Super was a bike that Laxmi fondly brought to Bangalore after it had dutifully served her in the hill town of Manipal. I guess the bike may not have exerted much there , for the distance between her house (a staff quarter allocated to her father who also taught there) to her alma mater, the MIT (Manipal Institute of Technology) where she later taught must have barely been 150 meters. I fondly named it Laxmi’s dhanno , inspired by Basanti’s mount in Sholay.

And Dhanno found its true calling on the bustling roads of Bangalore. Not only could it could zig zag its way through unruly traffic with remarkably agility, parking was an added convenience and real bonus. This was a minor pleasure in itself. Now I could thumb a finger at all those rogue motorists who gave me a nightmare in the car. And of course the bike could squeeze through the tightest of openings in parking lots as also those dense standing traffic awaiting the green light nirvana. It brought down the commuting time on my designated routes by almost 50% - no scientific tests but simple funda, this 2 wheeler of a widget could simply wriggle its way through traffic , either standing or slow moving , so much so that it always ended up at the front of the traffic signal or near about . This gave a lot of leeway in bringing down the commuting times as the queuing length decreased & the frontal traffic dint slow one down.

So every time I venture out with this machine and take a look at the ever increasing traffic on Bangalore’s congested roads , I may be subconsciously murmuring ‘Chal meri Dhanno’ .