The tale of how the irrepressible Bullet chewed up Indian streets
Everyone who바카라s ever owned or ridden a Bullet before the 2000s knows the struggles바카라and pleasures바카라involved in managing the beast. Oil leaks, bad brakes, the travails of finding a decent mechanic. A personal nemesis was wet distributor points during the brief monsoons in Delhi. But then there was the ride with the legendary 바카라thump바카라.
The Royal Enfield (RE) story is by now legend on Dalal Street바카라how a company struggling to sell 2,000 motorcycles a month some two decades back made the turnaround to becoming, at one point, India바카라s most-valued two-wheeler company, selling 8,00,000-plus bikes by 2018. How one model, the retro-styled Classic 350 with a half-decent new engine, helped turn RE into a global icon.
Indian Icon starts in 2000 with Siddhartha Lal, the Eicher group scion taking over the reins, and tells the turnaround story with finesse while packing in an incredible amount of detail. It works in the business history, keeping the focus on the past two decades, marking the contributions those who helped make it happen. These include the by now famous V. Sunil and Mohit Jayal, who helped reinvent the fading brand and R.L. Ravichandran (RLR), who gave shape to the RE Classic, and the not-so-well-known S. Sivakumar, whose sketch based on the 바카라British Single바카라 became the basis for the bike바카라s looks.
At the heart of the book is the story about the RE Classic. Fascinatingly, it started with RLR asking the question, 바카라바카라why are these fellows still buying our product? They should boycott us바카라, and trying to understand the psyche of people buying a product with so many issues. So they got to work, kept the bike바카라s essence--the rugged design-- while modernising it to make it more rider-friendly. Every RE rider will identify with the parts about the 바카라100 pain points바카라, how the UCE engine came to be and the agonising over how it sounds.
The boom in the desi leisure motorcycling market came at the right time for RE, affording its push to go global. That meant setting up the UK Technical Centre, and the push in North and South America. It also led to a diversification in product portfolio with a café racer, the GT 535, and the Himalayan ADV. The two were not received well, the GT 535 written off as a bone rattler and the Himalayan for bad build quality. What RE did especially well was learn from its mistakes. The platform for the 535 led to the Interceptor and the GT 650; the Himalayan is in its second gen avatar, with plans to bump up the 411 cc engine to the 650 range. Now, you can hardly see a bad review, especially since the price points make it such a value-for-money proposition in the West. The book perhaps could have dwelt a little more on RE바카라s future global strategy. There is fatigue in the Indian market (RE is no longer an exclusive thing; one in 15 motorcycles on the road is now a company product), sales have slowed down and the mid-range market is crowding up.
What Amrit Raj does really well is the brief interludes on the Indian two-wheeler industry바카라richly mined capsules on topics like the shift from scooters to bikes (marketshare for the former fell from 85 per cent in the mid-바카라80s to 20 per cent in a decade), how emission norms affected the industry (it killed off the much-loved Yamaha RX 100), the Hero Honda-Bajaj wars, and, of course, Enfield바카라s own history and how it reached Indian shores via the Madras Motors company.
The only think you can fault are frequent repetitions바카라the factory at Thirovotiyur and the oldest paint unit will not be forgotten easily. Also, the prologue and its cast of stock 바카라we-love-the-Bullet바카라 characters seem to be a last minute add-on which missed the editor바카라s eye. And clunker lines like, 바카라The thrill of vibration that my body gets while riding a bike compensates for my inability to hear the thump바카라! One suspects the flyer on the dust jacket, 바카라Soon to be a major web series바카라, had something to do with this. Bullet Mani, here we come.