Silver Bullet

With five straight months of falling sales, Royal Enfield’s decade-old dream run has come to a screeching halt. Here’s how Siddhartha Lal plans to get the Bullet maker firing on all cylinders again

- Rajiv Singh

The ritual starts at 9 am every Wednesday. The 18,000 sq ft building on the bustling National Highway 2 in Uttar Pradesh (UP) is packed with a boisterous bunch of young ardent ‘devotees’ from the adjoining village of Maholi. The crowd, which includes over a dozen turbaned middle-aged men in their early 40s, has come for a glimpse of the main ‘deities’ enshrined at Aryaman Enterprises, around 2 km from the temple city of Mathura.

The chatter ebbs suddenly as Krishna Singh enters the sprawling edifice. The bulky ‘priest’, dressed in brown leather jacket with armour pockets on its shoulders, greets the crowd as he walks down towards the sanctum sanctorum, where an aesthetically designed Classic 350 is displayed on a wooden platform. Singh, 28, lowers his Ray-Ban glasses and glances at his Apple Watch. At 9 am, he presses the electric start button, and revs up to full throttle with a slight twist of the right wrist. “Rotating the wrist towards oneself increases the amount of gas that feeds the engine,” he informs the pack, atop a fleet of Bullets and Thunderbirds, who duly repeat the ritual.

Aryaman Enterprises, the only Royal Enfield (RE) showroom in Mathura, reverberates with a loud thumping sound. The crowd lustily cheers the show that Singh conducts every week to build excitement and connect with potential buyers. A few students from Maholi, enrolled in Agra’s Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar University, inquire about the price of the recently launched Twins—Continental GT 650 and Interceptor 650. Others are curious to know about the delivery time for a new Classic 350. A troop of agents from top banks and NBFCs— HDFC, Tata Capital, Cholamandalam Finance and Hinduja Leyland—starts hunting for prospective buyers, wooing them with tantalising loan deals. Some even go to the extent of offering 100 percent finance on the on-road cost.