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| Guilty before trial |
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| Motorcycles are evil death mongers, apparently. What nonsense! |
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By : Kyle Pereira | Published : April 18, 2012 |
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I'm furious. In fact, I'm in such a rage that I will go on to state that I live in a country where logic and common sense are things that seem to be absent in the minds of the decision and law makers and even certain members of the press.
This morning, I pick up the newspaper to find a photograph of a mangled Pulsar 200 and another one with a bloke with a cell phone stuck to his ear. Then I read an account about how the guy paid with his life, and I quote verbatim, 'because he had a fast bike, because he felt invincible and, harsh as it sounds, because of his own recklessness.'
Doesn't this just sound absurd? He bought a bike and that one act was stated as the first reason for this guy's mortal end?
Then, I go on to read that the guy's 'Pulsar 200 weaved too far to the left side of the road'.
Wait a minute. Did the bike kill him? Far from it. As anyone who has ridden a motorcycle will firmly attest, the bike won't run until you start it. It won't accelerate unless you make it go faster. And it won't stop until you pull on the brakes. In short, a motorcycle is just a pile of metal, plastic and rubber that will go nowhere without a rider at the helm of its controls.
So its logical to conclude that it takes an idiot on a motorcycle to create a nuisance, not the motorcycle itself. It might seem that I won't even pay my respects to the dead, but the fact remains that this guy is no more with us because he was racing on a public road sans a helmet, or any protective gear for that matter, with absolute and blatant disregard for his own life and the lives of the other road users that fateful night. Its his fault and his fault alone. Don't pin the blame on the motorcycle, it went where he wanted it to go and it sped up when he wanted it to.
Then there was the case where a young kid, with a rich cricketer dad, was gifted a litre class on his birthday. Just who gifts a 19 year old kid a superbike? Beats me, really. Anyway, one fine day, he and his cousin head out, on the look out for speed, and unfortunately, the inevitable happened. They crashed, the pillion riding cousin was killed on the spot and the rider died a few days later. Both were riding without protective gear.
What does the grieving dad do? Well, he decides to start an anti-sportsbike mission. What the press failed to include in the article was the irresponsibility of the father to give his teenage son a motorcycle that demands years of riding experience and maturity in the first place. Money doesn't buy common sense, it proves.
People fall from multi-storey buildings. Demolish them all. People slip and die in bathrooms. Ban bathing completely. Dumb asses stand on the tops of trains and get electrocuted. Close down the railways. Hammers in the hands of an imbecile can kill. No hammers to be sold in the country. Yes, the same logic, right..
And don't get me started on the Mumbai police's campaign to get 'loud' motorcycles off the road. The accompanying photo was of a bunch of Harleys and the like pulled up at the side of the road, with the lead photo showing a uniformed cop (without a helmet of course) riding pillion and dangling a deciblemeter just above the exhaust pipe of a black Harley on the move.
You cough up roughly double of what the bike would cost abroad in duties and taxes (and you do that because you're a good citizen) only to have your friendly (not) cop shove a decibel meter into your tail pipe to check how much sound it makes? Isn't there a stipulated distance that is to be maintained between the meter and the source of the sound? And shouldn't there be a clearly mentioned rev range that the sound should be measured between? Or do you make the rider rev his bike to the limiter and then book him for being a law breaker?
How did the motorcycle clear homologation then? So is it quiet enough to be given the green signal by the homologating officials but noisy enough to get a ticket by the Mumbai police? Speaking about homologation, in Mumbai, it is apparently illegal to ride/drive during the days with your headlights on. Don't ask me why because doing so actually improves your vehicle's visibility by about 20 percent and this isn't just me saying so - studies the world over prove it. Anyway, almost all imported cars and bikes that clear homologation use daytime running lights. How do they pass the homologation then, if their lights are illegal in Mumbai, if not other parts of the country? Double standards, are they not?
What does this do for you and me, the avid motorcyclists? Nothing, apparently. The various automobile associations continue to charge for membership but do nothing for members. Unless we form something like the AMA that actually fights for rights of motorcyclists, we're alone in this fight. We need to quell the growing resentment towards our passion and tell the world that what we ride isn't a hazard to life. What say?
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