by "Burn" for webBikeWorld.com
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This book is available from Amazon.com:
One Life to Ride: A Motorcycle Journey to the High Himalayas
It isn't hard to get me interested in a motorcycle book;
it's the reading part that's tough.
Not that I don't like reading, mind you -- it's just
that like everyone else in our modern world, I'm so used to sucking down
information fast and furious via the Tube that having to actually work at
it by running my eyeballs across a page is too much like work.
And my brain -- ouch! You mean I have to put it in
gear too?
It's like raking the leaves. I
can't just jump up from the dinner table and run outside and start
raking. I have to work up to it. Sometimes, it
takes me a couple of weeks to work up to it. Sometimes, it may
take months.
That's why Ajit Harisinghani's book "One Life to Ride"
sat in the pile after it arrived, collecting dust before I finally talked
myself into peeling back the cover to see what's inside.
I'm glad I did. I should have done it sooner.
The problem with most of the motorcycle adventure books
I've read is that, well, they're not written by writers. By that I mean
they're usually written by people who think they can write and who think that
just because they went off on a long trip somewhere and brought along a
laptop that the rest of us
really care.
The fact of the matter is that a true adventure yarn is
way more than a diary that reads like a ship's log. We don't
really care if your bike took two rather than three liters of oil the
12th day into the journey.
In fact, a good motorcycle adventure
story will only peripherally mention the bike. Yes, it's there, in the background, and serves as the sort of
canvas that holds the ink, but the real story is in the impression of
the color, the art and what it says.
A good motorcycle adventure book will be just as
interesting to non-motorcyclists also. An example or two can be
found in the webBikeWorld
book reviews. Surprisingly -- or maybe not -- the best ones were
written by authors you never heard of, like Frank Huffman's classic
Monks and
Motorcycles and Theresa Wallach's book
The Rugged Road, to name a
pair.
These are stories written by people who understood the
romance of the road, the nature of an adventure and who were eager to learn everything
they could about different cultures and traditions. They also knew how
to convey the freshness and excitement and awe to their audience.
One Life to Ride joins that august club, because it too
captures this essence. A promise to a
dying friend and a lifelong devotion to that most peculiar of
motorcycles, the new/old Royal Enfield, ignited the spark that started
this tale.
What is unique is that it is of India by an Indian,
looking at his country, his people and his culture with the objectivity
of an outsider but
with an insider's depth of knowledge and understanding.
India seems a mythical land to the rest of us, and we could never hope to understand such a
deep and complex world even if we took 1,000 journeys across the vast
sub-continent. But Mr. Harisinghani has spun a wonderful narrative
of a journey where you're riding pillion on a 4,300 kilometer adventure from Pune in
west-central India all the way north, through Jaipur and New Delhi, all
the way up to Leh and Jammu.
It's fun, it's exciting, it's spiritual with a sense of
humor and you'll learn a lot about a fantastic and varied country
and a culture that is one of the foundations of the human
race.
Highly recommended, One Life to Ride would make a great
surprise holiday gift for any of your book-loving, adventure-seeking
friends, motorcyclists or not.
This book is available from Amazon.com:
One Life to Ride: A Motorcycle Journey to the High Himalayas
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