Fall from grace

My Pulsar is very nearly the coolest thing on wheels. I love its colour, its sound, and its aggressive feel on the road. But it has the same inherent disadvantage of anything on two wheels. It's natural static state is not one of balance. A minor obstacle is more than enough to bring a shabby finale to it's high spirited adventures.

As you'd have guessed I have had my fair share of accidents on two wheels. The first time I was in class 1 or 2 when a Luna ploughed into me while I was crossing the road to get to my school bus. I didn't even know to ride a bicycle back then and my painful history of mishaps with two wheelers had already begun. When I finally did learn to ride a bicycle, it was a couple of weeks before I learnt to use the brakes or trust myself to make a U-turn on my building's terrace. Most of the times I'd just ride on into the wall. A couple of hundred bruises later, I managed to reach the stage of road worthiness only to find myself riding into a barb wire fence in the darkness on one occasion and then once into a ditch where the municipality was laying telephone lines. Besides there was another time when a scooter caught the rear end of my bicycle and the wheel was a twisted mess. 

Then came the turn on my faithful TVS Scooty which was curiously kind to me chucking me to ground only once. I was barrelling up a mildly sand covered road on the wrong side in the middle of the day and she decided that it was time to teach me a lesson. So down I went and so did my pal, Abhishek was unfortunate enough to be my pillion rider that day. Considering that we took a tumble on the opposite side of the road, we emerged pretty much unscathed and so did my Scooty.

My Pulsar has already announced that it would not put up with mishandling and has brought me down to earth twice already. That's one of the reasons that I've learnt to respect its power a lot more. The older I get, the more difficult it is for me to overcome the fear of the next fall not to mention the everlasting blush of embarassment right after the fall. As cool a thing that coasting along on a two wheeler always is, a fall really makes me shaky. It's like I am expecting to take a tumble every second after that. It takes quite some time now before the unnatural fear of being spilled on the road goes away. Back when I was a kid, dusting myself up and getting on the saddle was a breeze. It's so much more difficult now! I guess that's what they call growing up; being afraid of making mistakes, paying too much attention to what the world thinks and consequently becoming just another sheep in the flock.