



My critique of the scooter begins with the impersonal facts of its engineering. Its real-world characteristics, what it does for its buyers as a product. How the rear-mounted engine makes for a weightless front, encourages easy maneuverability and discourages hard moves. How its small wheels allow for a low center of gravity to create a sense of anchor in this inherently unstable design called the two-wheeler. How bare ether between the legs, instead of a motorcycle fuel tank, creates an ergonomically unsafe design, with nothing but the balance-preserving handlebars to hold on to, and upset.

All of this was built into the scooter's scheme. Post-war post-industrial urbania was both its raison d'être and its football field. Past the big fight in Europe, cities had changed, money was short, and people needed to get busy like never before. Unlike the motorcycle (read motorized bicycle) which preceded it, the scooter was the first critical questioning of the two-wheeler as a design, from the ground up. The frame was done away with - the body connected the two wheels, much like the monocoque of a car. The resulting light structure allowed for a small engine, now mountable on the swingarm itself, minus chains or shafts for transmission. The scooter returned answers that looked utterly spot-on under city lights.



But stretch this line a little further, into the territory of use, and we begin to gauge how utterly able and unique the scooter is at doing what it does. We begin to speak about how the scooter makes us feel, how we leave the sticky-choosy territory of the consumer attempting to make the perfect buying decision, and actually start turning into owners. How the easy maneuverability morphs into breezy blitheness around town. How the low-lying lack of clearance makes corner speeds irrelevant, and easy-riding normative. How the absence of the fuel tank allows for Chunnu to stand on the footboard and discover flying, first hand. We begin to see the genesis of a more sincere affection and attachment. The roots of a true culture.



The motorcycle has been around at least since the beginning of the last century, but when the scooter-as-we-know-it arrived around in the mid-1940s, its impact left the motorcycle with no option but to man up. Bikes, once pitched to 'gentlemen' with illustrations of happy, smiling, strong-jawed men, were transformed by marketing brains and positioned as rebel machines, the same product suddenly 'built' for adventure and the great outdoors in the public eye.



The emerging polarity was as drastic as that between raging stallions and playful ponies. Or transposing the concept on to a scale closer home, the difference between the menacing black buffalo that carries Yama, and the demure, giving cow that can be tied outside the house and worshipped. Thus began India's long, and at different times hot, cool and cold love affair with the scooter.



Kickstarting cultures





Present day streets. News of the Honda Activa overthrowing the decades-long reign of the Hero Splendor to become the most sold motorized vehicle in the country is trickling in. In another, more metropolitan India, the Vespa is simultaneously making a chic style statement, and unintentionally bringing back the nostalgia that a nation holds, dormant in its noisy and cluttered identity, for the round headlamp sputterer. Seems somewhat misplaced, since the scooter never left India in the first place. Products evolved and overlapped as ideas of India formed and reformed, but the scooter stuck around. The license raj Bajaj Chetak took the torch from the aesthete's Lambretta, the electronic ignition of the Bajaj Super FE took over from the Vijay Super's contact-point ignition, the gear-free two-stroke Kinetic Honda and TVS Scooty became the flag-bearers of genuine urban mobility for women until the era of the four-stroke dawned.



View the situation through the goggles of culture, and the changes start revealing themselves. Scooters have begun to get cooler, but in the shallow and plastic manner that consumption dictates. Dogmas of 'placement' are making manufacturers segment, label and sell their scooters to focused demographics with taglines like 'Why should boys have all the fun?' and 'The Bro Code'. On hoardings around town, phoren-ish models dressed in Milan casuals are seen posing nonchalantly on a little red retro number, next to text that reads 'Life by Vespa' - aiming straight for the jugular of PYTs who cannot settle for the Honda Dio that everyone else has. Even LML, the last true geared scooter-maker standing, is looking to impart a 'young, fresh image' to its brand through its latest TVC, where a young couple rides around town and finally locks its lips around a single cone of ice-cream. Trying to be 'trendy', as futile as the concept sounds, is unraveling itself as the trend.



This 'trendiness' in relation with the scooter has struck before, only with immeasurably more simplicity and elegance, and in a context honest enough to inspire entire countercultures. The scooter, whether with Gregory Peck or Dev Anand at the handlebars, has always lent itself without effort to making a statement. Its draw has transcended times and spaces, generations and continents. It carried Italian bellas through the cobbled streets of Turin, flowing with their pastel skirts. Warmed up to the large chrome mirror frivolousness of the slicked-out, existential and oft-violent Mods of 1970s Britain, riding in Parkas to the music of The Who. Created its own subculture of chopped and dropped radical design expressions in Japan. And settled softly, through the decades, with our own working-class fathers, kindergarten-dropping mothers and college-goers on a crush. The appeal of the scooter as a product is universal, but its emotional resonance has deep throbbing basslines of culture and expression written into the score.



A love closer home…





The 1950s presented a fertile decade for the sowing of the seeds of this affection in India. Much like ravaged postwar Europe, a new nation waking up to freedom with crunched cash and yet-to-appear infrastructure needed wheels to move around. The scooter made its debut as the solution to this situation through Automobile Products of India (API), in the shape of the made-in-Italy 50cc Lambretta. Bajaj Auto began importing the Vespa 150 and sold it through the '60s too. The new vehicle began to catch the fancy of people around the country, inciting curiosity and comments. Hindi poet Sharad Joshi, legend says, had a particularly notable one: "What sort of a vehicle looks like a pregnant goat?" The love may have had different expressions, but it had certainly begun to take a form that was original, not marketed or borrowed.



It wasn't until the '70s, though, that the scooter really came into form as the definitive set of Indian wheels. Italian names were ditched and robust Indian brands were forged around the same products. The Lambretta transformed into the Vijay Super through the government-owned Scooters India Ltd (SIL). On a parallel track, Bajaj Auto rebranded the Vespa Sprint and began selling it as the Chetak. SIL also distributed parts to be assembled by different private manufacturers all over the country, and as a result brands diversified and proliferated. Allwyn Pushpak, Girnar Leo, Narmada 150, Kesri - Indian names that the masses could pick with pride and build relationships with.



…that lives on





Images and sounds from the streets of yore, dotted with scooters, still reverberate with buyers who gained consciousness before the '90s opened up the insular Indian marketplace and changed its face forever.



Manoj Musale is just one of the rapidly growing ilk of buyers who is catching these echoes. Albeit lucrative, Manoj's signage fabrication business in Pune amounts to a long, hard day. Welding steel frames in the workshop and spending an equal amount of time on city streets moving between locations that await his attention. His set of wheels, his partner in grime through labour management and toil, is a shiny Piaggio Vespa. Montebianco White, complete with large, round chrome mirrors. "I used to ride my father's Lambretta back in college and I loved how it felt," he reminisces. The skin-deep nostalgia that the look of the shiny new Vespa presented was found to be irresistible, despite the significantly heavier price tag.



I haven't asked, but I doubt if Gregory Peck and Roman Holiday have had a lasting impact on Manoj. Ditto for addressing that shade of white by its 'exotic', unheard of and tough-to-pronounce correct European name. The aesthete's flair of the classic, minimal and curvaceous design is universally appealing, but what it inspires within the hearts of middle-India is something very different. It is fuelled by decades of memories, and a link with India's own homegrown automotive culture.



We have loved scooters for long enough now to want to go back to them. Rampant rural sales of the otherwise overpriced Vespa VX 125, especially in my part of Maharashtra which is next door to Piaggio's scooter assembly plant at Baramati, is the most obvious example. LML, which still manufactures and even exports Vespa-style scooters to Europe, can vouch for the sales this warm acquaintance brings. The keyword mentioned in a brief conversation with a member of the company's advisory board was "familiarity". A chunk of LML's sales is still coming from buyers who are steeped in the tradition of the twist-grip gear change and wish to stick with what works for them. Buoyed by the sentiments of this buyer, LML is looking to spread beyond its traditional north Indian territory and venture into Gujarat and Maharashtra soon.



The man in his 50s with a loose white jhabba-pyjama and Gandhi topi, probably a hark to his political connections, riding a bright yellow Vespa, too small for him in frame but large enough to fill his being with familiar comfort, has little to do with making a statement. It has everything to do with feel-good



























































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