Chak de Goa!!!

seriously I am too lazy to write anything about the trip...except that one picture depicts thousands word and I am posting lots of interesting pics of our 4 days trip on bike http://picasaweb.google.com/chronicated/ChakDeGoa

while ady and I rode together to goa. we took different routes while coming back, so it was all the way solo ride.

Goa I am coming

With the left(CPI-M) screwing the development of India and congress projecting rahul gandhi as their messiah I think I cant take it anymore of daily news. I think its time for me to leave office and leave bangalore and make news of my own. with all the political instability in karnataka I hope to make stable planned trip to goa for 5 days with my friend adarsh on our bikes.

so finally I am done with the shopping list for the trip but still I feel I am missing something. anyways bike is feeling good after it got its new lightening handle bar ... Adarsh adviced me to sleep early which is so unlike me. I always end up partying, drinking day before I ride and mostly ride in hangover.. But he is right since we will be riding whole day at pretty good speed so need all the concentration. so no wine and dine tonight, which catch up with sonal and virat(couple of the month) for cup of coffee at barista. there is this story which I remember now( I repeat the word remember ) its like sometime back virat, the man of the moment, blasted the hell out of waiter at this particular barista for pathetic service and waiter gave him very meEn;) look. Now he think its not a good idea to goto barista for sometime. so it will be interesting to see whether the waiter remembers virat tonight or not. Whatever happens, I am not ordering anything tonight at barista..lol just light dinner and will hit the bed early.

Also there is lot of changes since the trip idea was conceived. now we are going directly to goa and will try doing west coast while coming back. with south west monsoon hitting west coast I hope to beat the game which rain is playing with me these days.. simply get drenched..

its a 5 day trip and since the bike is brand new I am not carrying lot of spares but still as a biker I think following thing are must.
one accelerators cable
one clutch cable
one spark plug

My personal stuff going to be something like following
1 jacket
6 tees,
3 jeans,
2 shorts, 1 track,
1 running shoes(yes I plan to run everyday),
1 slipper,
4 pairs of shocks,
6 underwear
pack of toiletries, camera and FRISBEE

So see you all after 5 days.
Cheers
Rajesh

Ride to Tirumala

On 22nd night I learnt that I have to reach tirumala by 9 am next morning for an important work which would decide my future... DAMN. Worse this was going to be my first ever ride to tirupati. So idea of taking bus was floating in my mind, but I trusted my raging bull who is ever ready and 3000 kms old now, So I simply decided to ride and come back on the same day.I started from my place around 5 am. Plan was to drive on NH4 and take really less stops. So I planned my first stop at CCD@kolar for coffee. The problem I face with coffee breaks@CCD is that I always spend more than required time simple 'coz its so relaxing. Road was great and to my luck traffic was less. Raging Bull was doing 100+ all the time given it was due for second service. So in no time I reached chittoor and still it was 7.45 am. So I decided to take a extended butt break and started for tirumala. and weather only became better with every km. the ghat section was free from traffic and was cloudy.
I reached hilltop at 9.10. My personal record, I did 292 kms in 4 hrs 10 mins. Spend some time, got the job done and left that place for bangalore at 1.20 pm.
reached Bangalore while it was raining around 7.10. but thanks to my Cramster riding gear I wasn't wet and cold.
Over all did 602 in 14 hrs out of which i rode for 9 hrs. Proud of my bike which brought me home safely in tough conditions. Owe it to the quality of roads also and less traffic which allowed me to do high speeds for long stretches. the rest of the picture are here


Distance: From JP nagar to Tiruamal it was around 292 kms.

Road condition: In general the road condition is good is excellent but watch for few potholes 'coz they come all of the sudden on such a good road

Route - Bangalore - Kolar - Chittoor - Chandragiri- Tirumala

IT'S GOA BABYY!!!!

For long I have planning to ride along west coast from mangalore to goa. with ady showing interest plan is on. raj, jugs might join us. so here's the plan for goa and for photography..No brownies to guess but easiest part was to plan for 4th november which is driving back from goa - straight to bangalore :)

might start at 30th and halt at mangalore and then continue from below..but as if know this the plan..

31st Oct Start early morning by 5.30 sharp (we have to stick to it)Drive to Mangalore on NH 48 via Kunigal - Channarayapatna - Hassan - sakleshpur - mangalore (360 Kms) Take a Big BreakDrive to Maravanthe on NH 17 reach by late evening and halt for the night (105)

1st Nov Early morning enjoy the sight at maravantheand start after break fast and leave for murdeshvar island(60kms) and drive to Go-karna for lunch(80 kms) and chill out rest of the evening day and night

2nd Nov Early morning see OM Kudle beach, do photography and start after breakfast and reach karwar(60 kms) beach (photography) and finally reach palolem by evening and chill out in the evening and night..port wine and good food....

3rd Nov start for goa city and chill out for full day and night(maybe at anjuna or calangute)

4th Nov Start early and drive back to bangalore 578 kms and reach home by night time..... killer driving....

here are my thoughts why goto goa, jus chill out palolem for two days, its a better, cheaper place, less crowded and lot of foreigners.....also we will save 200 kms of driving....

and joey of FRIENDS would have said "IT'S GOA BABYY"

RTMC - CAMAN THE ENJAIMENT

CAMAN THE ENJAIMENT , no this is not a typo but the way southies speak common the enjoyment.. I like it 'coz it has got a accent now...this three words are the punch line for all the events held by my club RTMC. So when september comes which is when RTMC was formed, RTMC organizes anniversary ride and party for club members. Sometime late mods emailed "6A pardy, CAMAN THE ENJAIMENT"
and the list of bikers started swelling everyday. and within few days we had close to 150 bikers ready to pardy(another RTMC lingo, maybe due to huge mallu crowd in the club) at captiol village, Madikere on 29th and 30th sept.

I too invited my friend raj to witness the event and make an lasting impression on him about RTMC. We were all set to ride and I stopped drinking 2 weeks back to save my for the day and drink as much as possible. and the one night prior my good old friend ady boy called me to his club to plan the ride. And I knew I am in trouble, 'coz his HSR club is meant only for drinking and eating. And if you resist you are a bad bad business man for letting go the opportunity of drinking cheap black dog. So promising myself to restrict to one large I met Ady. But its a different thing that I came home at 2 am after gossiping with him having 4 large. thanks to the thirst I was having ever since i decided to save my self for the pardy. and worst I had to get up by 5 am and ride 270 kms.
Eventually Raj gave me call and woke me up and we met at bangalore university gate where few bikers where waiting I remember sam, hosay, goop to name a few. Ours was the batch of volunteers as we had to reach before the actual group and take care of things. And so we started riding around 6 am after deciding to ditch anil for good cause. and ride was smooth, weather was good, I missed the turn near srirangapatna but was soon able to catch up with them. I was also donning the riding gear bought just 2 days back and was really happy for some reason. Then we met rain and sunshine and dust too...
finally at siddapura we took the ghat road and man ghats get me horny in totally different way. while it was drizzling I was driving my bike at risky speed. I was scared hence careful but just couldnt slow down. Finally reach capitol hill and met rest of the pack. Finally after 1 hrs the main group arrived and whole valley was echoing with soothing thumping sound of 100 bullets.
Rest of day went escorting people to there room, yeah I volunteered for that.

And finally in the evening pardy started with DJ sam trying to play numbers to satisfy everybody. In betweem there was cake cutting and some presentation, and did we care..yep we cared 'coz we were waiting for dance numbers to start. In the meanwhile I met lots of friend from club and decided to settle down with sushil, biscuit, bra and others.
slowly the party unwinded and people started swaying there bodies. I too joined. and we all had a blast till late night.
I planned to hit the bed early 'coz raj and I were planning to goto mudigere and take NH 48 while way back to bangalore. so we started but lost our way due to huge road works going on and decided to take lots of break and reach bangalore lazily but before football starts. on the way back we joined rocky, pallavi, pratik, nai roast and my good old friend ady boy. we grabbed some lunch on the way and I managed to reach home by 6 pm. what a feeling it was, it was good ride, good prady and I still had enough time to change and goto to ground to play football and brag about this trip to junta..the rest of pics can be seen here

Distance: From JP nagar to madikere it was around 260 kms.

Road condition: In general the road condition is good till hunsur and the broken stretches are mostly repaired now.After you hit piriyapatna roads are bad till siddipura given you take ghat road, if you commercial route bad road continues till madikere.

Route - Bangalore - Srirnagaptana - Eilivala - Hunsur- piriyapatna - siddipura - madikere

Why a Bullet?

A great article for those interested in the Enfield Bullet ! Check out when time permits.
Might explain why guys like me still ride the Bullet Inspite of all the negatives that naysayers can shoot at it,,,....

What’s bigger than the Bullet? - Swami Ashwinananda Friday, November 07, 2003

Seemingly innocent question, teenaged boy on a bicycle, small dusty village on NH 45. And considering I was on an RE 500, I smiled confidently and replied ‘nothing else in the country’! Little did I know I was being set up to be knocked down. The young chap had been strolling around my bike as I enjoyed the customary ‘chai’ at a local tea shop, his casual air of disinterest thinly concealing the gleam of admiration in his eyes. My answer was met with a disdainful smirk. ‘I saw a foreigner on a Yamaha last week. That was much bigger. He told me they’re going to make it in India. 1200 cc, and it was sooo (he stretched his arms out as far as they would go) big. When I'm old enough, that’s what I’m going to ride’. He gave my bike one last look out of the corner of his eye, then pedaled away nonchalantly on his creaky bicycle. Many kilometers down the road, and alone with my thoughts on the highway, I pondered his question. It was the classic mental pivot. Both ridiculously simplistic and unbelievably deep at the same time.

‘What’s bigger than the Bullet?’

In the old days, people bought a Bullet not because of displacement, size or weight, but for very different reasons. It was the ‘Raja Gadi’. The choice of real men. At least that was the picture Bullet advertising painted then, and a vivid and colourful picture it was, best viewed with the ‘Bullet meri jaan’ jingle playing in your head.

Then about 15 years ago, the Jap Bike wars started. First there were the hundreds, then later the one-tens, the one-fifties, the one-seventy-fives… each claiming to deliver more power and ‘better mileage’, if that’s even possible at the same time, than the other. Buzz boxes abounded, tiddlers screamed manically on every street, and on another road far from where these marketing, R&D and advertising wars were being fought, the Grand Daddy of them all chugged steadily towards the brink of oblivion.

Recently though, there seems to be have been a revival of sorts, at first glance, rather heartening to a die-hard British motorcycle enthusiast like me. It seems as though more people are waking up from their Jap drone-induced stupor, and noticing that there was always a bike that was ‘bigger’ than the plastic clad Jappos available in the country.

Suddenly, one sees many young, macho, iron pumping, testosterone charged, leather clad gentlemen on Bullets. Not just the new-fangled ones, but some even on bikes a tad older than they are. Heartened by this turn of events, I accosted one recently, and asked him why he had chosen to ride a Bullet. My eager curiosity was met by a flat and fake-accented answer. ‘Who wants to buy a 180 cc when there’s a 535 cc available maan. It’s the biggest bike in India!’

I smiled thinly, shook his hand, and walked away thinking to myself ‘maybe the Bullet did manage to stop before it got all the way to oblivion. But it’s probably just standing there teetering at the brink.’

There’s a reason for my pessimism. Viewed from the cubic capacity perspective, the BHP perspective, the wheelbase and weight perspective, the ‘sheer size’ perspective or the advertising budget perspective, there will soon be many, many contenders to the position of Biggest Motorcycle in India. Which means that our testosterone-charged gentleman would buy one of them the moment it shows up on the market (attractively priced I might add). Just as soon, I presume, as he’d use an opportunity to take his shirt off and flex his tattooed muscles.

People today seem to be buying the Bullet for reasons like machismo (pun unintended), attitude, power and freedom. All the wrong reasons if you ask me. Because they’re all easily re-created, duplicated, and maybe even outdone by competition. Just like the 100cc Japs stopped the Bullet in its tracks 15 years ago, we’ll soon have 250, 350 and maybe even 750 and 1200cc Japs shooting the Bullet down again with weapons like cubic capacity, cruiser styling, fatter tyres, more chrome, and more jeans-leather-and-scantily-clad-women advertising --- all of which are in vogue now.

So what is it that will keep the Bullet competitive through the waves of onslaught from bikes that cater to the changing fancies of fickle Indian motorcyclists? What does the Bullet have going for it that no other manufacturer can hope to match no matter how much money he spends on research, development, space-age materials and nubile models?

I think the answer can be summed up in one word. Character.

To me, the Bullet stands for simplicity. A design that worked well not because it changed to incorporate every new discovery at NASA, but because the folks that designed it 50 years ago got everything right the first time. And then didn’t try to fix things that weren’t broke. It’s a bike that has built a reputation for being reliable, simple to work with, comfortable to be with, and lasts a whole lifetime… which is definitely a whole lifetime longer than the Japs, who outdate their throwaway models before one has even paid the second EMI. The most interesting thing is that over the years, this unglamorous but truly solid reputation has rubbed off on people that ride the Bullet too. The result, when one looks closely, is a bond between an individual and his Bullet, where one is but the mirror of the other.

To some folks like me who’ve wanted a Bullet since we were kids, it was the persona of these people that inspired the choice of a motorcycle more than the intrinsic value of the motorcycle itself. They were simple people, responsible people, strong people (not just in body) and they were people you could trust and rely on. I for one just bought into the quiet pride, solidity and soft spoken yet powerful image of Bullet riders I saw as a child, only to realize much later that these were the qualities of the bike itself.

In this day where people are realizing it’s better to step back from technology and glamour sometimes and fly subsonic rather than supersonic, I hope that people soon learn to appreciate and aspire to own the Bullet for what it is. A piece of machinery that has lived, served, rewarded and stood by its owners long enough to develop a character of its own. A motorcycle that has reached that point in evolution where its value cannot be measured in cubic centimeters, kilometres per hour or pounds per square inch. And a brand that speaks volumes for its owner for a lifetime… always saying just the same old good things.

If I had encountered my cyclist friend on the way back, I would have stopped him on his creaky bicycle and given him the answer I should have given him in the first place.

There’s just one thing that’s bigger than the Bullet. It’s the pride of owning one.

Ragin Bullet 500 cc

MY BIKE a.k.a RAGINGBULL
The whole purpose of creating this blog is to post all my travel details. the blog address is ragingbull500 which i named 'coz my bike is 500cc and I named it raging bull the day I bought it. Till now already done nandi hills and yelagiri.
The name clicked the moment I started the bike and its was raging to go on top speed and its bullet..so ppl there you go "raging bull" but as many would raging bull is also a movie starring robert de niro. Yes I know and I loved the movie, Thanks.

No, I wont refer my bike as she or he since I dont see my bike as my girl friend as many of my fellow biker friends see it. In fact many prefer riding their bike than girlfriend :))