Dear Bajaj Auto,
Let me start by saying a big thank you! Thank you for giving my father his first two wheeler, the good old work horse Chetak. It was on my father’s Chetak that I had my first taste of two-wheeler riding while standing between the basket and his seat. Let me also thank you for launching The Pulsar, one of the most iconic motorcycle brands of our country, second only to the Bullet! Lastly, let me thank you for giving me my first motorcycle, the humble Pulsar 135LS which gave me the perfect balance of an economical city commuter and a decent highway tourer at a time when I was in college and had limited economical sources to afford and maintain a bike but the wanderlust to explore our beautiful and vast country. That’s not all, let me thank you for buying a stake in the performance oriented KTM and bringing the Dukes to our country, giving me a worthy upgrade from my beloved Pulsar.
Let me also applaud you for coming out with extraordinary machines having path-breaking technologies at surprisingly affordable price tags which have captivated the imagination of the youth of the world’s largest democracy for one and a half decades. Lastly, give a pat on the back of your intelligent marketing team for coming up with unique and appealing campaigns which has added more to your brand image than you can imagine! However, once you have done that, give them a tight whack so that you can bring back some sense into them.
Take yourself and your marketing team to the nearest mirror, look at yourselves and ask these question, Is this the reason for what you had set out in 2001? Do you want your followers to believe that you are an irresponsible company with your focus on sales using audaciously cheesy taglines which promote nothing but rowdiness and hooliganism? Or is it that your newest offering simply doesn’t have the quality like its predecessors to be a successful model and that is the reason why you need to vandalize motorcycles brands and motorcycle enthusiasts who swear by safe and responsible motorcycling?
You have managed to be in the thick of things of the Indian two-wheeler industry for decades! The reason for that are not just your amazing machines but also your advertising campaigns especially the taglines which has so far struck the right chords with its consumers and touched their souls. Your good old days made the average Indian feel connected to you when they rode a “Hamara Bajaj”. At a time when performance motorcycles were virtually non existent you pleasantly surprised the youth by coming up with a “Definitely Male” motorcycle which transformed the future of not just your company but Indian motorcycling as a whole. You were also one of the first companies to introduce “Digital Biking” to this country which resulted in “Inspiring Confidence” among its riders which is perhaps what made you so “Distinctly Ahead” that you ended up being “The Fastest Indian”.
Yet, like all companies and motorcycle brands the pulsar will also have an end. Being a loyal follower, I feel that you are perhaps trying a bit too hard with your newest offering. The over the top styling and the ridiculous ad campaign which openly promotes street racing and humiliates the hard work of all those people who are trying their best to make motorcycle track racing as a recognized sport in our country makes me fear that this will be a start of the decline of one of my favorite motorcycle brands.
How on earth can you come up with a tagline which directly insults the efforts of people and organizations like S Sarath, Rajini Krishnan, Rohit Giri, Apex Riding Academy, Buddha International Circuit, etc. To put things into perspective of our cricket-crazy nation, your new tagline “Leave Track Racing To Amateurs” basically asks a cricketer to focus on the flashy IPL rather than focusing on performing at Test Cricket level. You don’t need a Tendulkar or a Dravid to tell you that it is out rightly wrong! Don’t even start me on the social impact of the tagline. In a country where death from a motorcycle accident occurs every 15 minutes, “leaving track racing to amateurs” and “considering every green light as a flag off, every road as a new lap and each ride is a race” will not do any good to that statistics.
Wouldn’t it been great if you would have come up with a tagline which would have personified responsible racing? Or perhaps you could have simply stuck to the simple teaser of the RS 200 “The Fastest Pulsar Yet”
In spite of all this, I am hopeful, for I believe that a company of a stature of Bajaj, who has regularly transformed the scenario of Indian motorcycling and set benchmarks for others to follow will come out of this error of judgement, which in the larger scheme of things, will only be a small blip in the glorious history of Bajaj and Pulsar.
Yours,
Ardent-Pulsar-Lover-Who-Has-Ridden-Your-Smallest-Offering-To-The-Different-Corners-Of-The-Country-And-Loved-Every-Bit-Of-It.
