My recent ride to Kudremukh in Karnataka had many effects on me and one of them was the dawning of reason, now who would think a bike ride in the Ghats with a 500 cc Enfield would ever in your silliest dreams be the dawning of reason, but it did ,somewhere in the midst of the thrill and excitement of taking turn after turn chicane after chicane at higher and higher speeds ,I started to think ,and I thought a lot like an overflowing pot of boiling hot water,non-stop,I pondered why people crash in towns and what kept me from making a mistake when I was enveloped by risk here, how is it that some people even I would loose control in the city and here I seem to be riding with such ease ,the guys I rode with ,have never ridden the Ghats before and had their share of spills in the city, like me but here on the Ghats they seemed quite at ease ,especially Justin on the pulsar, the more he rode at speed on the Ghats he seemed to clear all 6 semesters of the Bachelor of rides exam and so were the others at their on pace, maybe that’s what experience does ,something no lecture or thesis’ can ,especially on the Ghats.

Think about all those riders who've ever impressed us, like our rider at the beginning of this story. They all seem to have a smooth, fluid, easy quality about them, an assurance which belies any stress or fear. They're always balanced, always in control. I suspect somewhere along the line they've acquired a germ of wisdom, hard-won over many miles, which has given them an appreciation of their own limits. They know where that tipping point is where their mastery of their bike, the road and the environment begins to slip away-and they long ago made the decision to stay this side of it.

Have you ever rode with another rider and admired the way he rode and the turns he takes and the way he cuts through the gears using every retardation and acceleration of his engine to either reduce his speed before a turn or get back to pace while exiting one ,most of all you notice the ease with which he does this and sooner or later you slide in behind him-or maybe he

glides smoothly around in front of you-and within a handful of corners you know there's something special here. It's not his

 hardware, which might be anything from an ancient Royal Enfield to a years-old Pulsar to the latest race-replica. Nor is it his clothing, which, if anything, wears Jeans, faded from long miles in the sun. Nor is it just that he's fast, though he probably carries a pretty crisp pace. No, what instantly gets your attention is the utter casualness-the sheer effortlessness-with which he rides along the road, dispatching the curves like so many pieces of candy. There's a relaxed assurance in his demeanor, a perfect confidence in his swift cadence, which gives rise to a certainty of what the next miles will bring. His speed is just-so. We watch for a while-assuming we're able to stay with him-and in our heart of hearts, where our desires stir and our egos live, we couch what we're seeing in the same way we always do. We know some guy; maybe we know lots of guys, buddies who are surely faster than Mr. Smooth and Effortless. Hell, maybe we're faster.

But even as we think these things, we can't escape the growing suspicion that this rider in front of us is just playing. Not with us, but with the road-probably the merest touch of a smile tugging at his lips as he glides through the corners-even as our own heart hammers a desperate beat as we're carried along in the rush behind him. Maybe it dawns on us, in a moment of honesty that he could just walk away if he wanted. One of those things you just know. So why doesn't he? Why it is that he seems content to just roll along, playing those curves in the road like so many riffs drifting easily from a well-worn guitar? We all talk about being good, about being smooth. Well, there he is, right in front of you.

In a sport whose very appeal is built around the merits of speed ,a sport where our greatest heroes are those who go the fastest, a sport where even the most mundane machinery comes dripping with performance, where even the clothes we wear are based upon the need to attenuate the risk we perceive ,it's hard not to get caught up in the notion that speed is the thing. It's both the yardstick by which we measure ourselves and the mantle in which we wish to be draped. Hell, who doesn't want to be fast?

Speed too much of it at least is a bad thing. It's the bogeyman waiting to catch us out any time we cross the imaginary line of too much. Most of us nod our heads when we hear that.

 We see guys all the time who manage to crash at quite modest speeds. And we know some admittedly a much smaller number who ride really fast, and have for a long time, but who never seem to crash. Not as in they don't crash very often. As in they never crash.

We all undertake an oath of risk every time we kick the starter it's just inherent to the sport. But those of us who choose to adopt a faster pace deliberately assume more of that danger. We knowingly engage the laws of probability in a game of chicken. You play it long enough and you lose. That's what we've always been told, right?