NEW OLD WAYS

Beautiful motorcycles and meandering thoughts, a little way down NH 66 

- Kartik Ware

Progress gets to everyone at some point. In both interpretations of that sentence. As long as older and younger people exist together, there will always be that particular point of resistance. And there is no human on this planet that doesn’t know what I’m talking about, one way or another. Any meaningful journey involves the passing of time. In my case, for reasons that continue to be a mystery, NH 66 is a space-time mesh of personal, geographical, historical and hopeful fascination. That doesn’t change the fact that as roads and machines get more capable, people around me seem to be going the other way. And you will unfortunately see digressions of that nature as you read along.

The first time I took NH 66 from Panvel to Goa, I was all of 19 years old (on my silver first-gen Pulsar 180 with an actual physical map book in a backpack), and it remains one of my favourite rides in the world to this day. This highway was built in the 1960s, and I’m willing to bet that it has seen more than its fair share of old cast-iron Bullets and two-stroke Jawas over the past 60-odd years. Today, however, NH 66 feels nothing like the road that lives in my memory. The same can be said of the Bullet 350 and the Jawa 350. The question is, which one of these bikes matches the vibe of NH 66 the best?

Our eyes and our brains have been defined by a rectangular frame for several thousand years — why has everything we look at today become overwhelmingly vertical? What sort of voluntary cognitive aberration is that?