Dedicated bikers rejoice, here is the answer to your crying needs for a bike which has the go to match its looks. Bajaj Auto's wholly-indigenous creation is here in Pulsar 180 form: smashing looks, fantastic kit in all respects, terrific Performance and great handling. One will never seek the RX100 feel from now on. The CBZ and the Fiero are not even in the same ball park. For the office-going family man who needs to perk up his daily commute, enter the Pulsar 150 with all the attributes of its bigger sibling but with affordability, style, poise, Performance, Fuel Efficiency and what have you! Passion, Splendor, GF125, Adreno, even the Aspire from the same stable, are in mortal danger. And we haven't even spoken pricing as yet! Great news, isn't it? Just what the doctor ordered to spice up Indian biking and take it a notch closer to the international mainstream, says Adil Jal Darukhanawala who got first crack at the Pulsar twins for an exclusive OVERDRIVE test.

One of the persistent grouses we, or for that matter any enthusiast Indian biker has got fed up of moaning or hearing about, has to be the lack of a bike with the snappy power delivery of the original RX100. Many have tried, most have failed, some have come close, but none has ever matched or excelled the original Yamaha. Then there was the matter of style and biking being most akin to sex on wheels, every Indian bike failed to deliver, until Hero Honda tried to stir things up in the loins with its CBZ. This bike truly was a major departure from the standard Indian spec but it had staying problems of a different kind. Performance was for long a taboo in the manufacturers' mindset and the mantra for the masses was Fuel Efficiency over all else, let pleasure of riding and handling and acceleration be damned. So you can see why no Indian motorcycle manufacturer, TVS-Suzuki included, dared to go in for a machine which embodied the three biking highlights I have expounded on in the Introduction of this feature. To all of us here who love motorcycles at OVERDRIVE, we have always let our emotions speak for themselves even with the most humdrum two-wheeler we test. We try to eke out the details which bring a smile to our faces and make our hearts skip a beat in pleasant Performance. Then along comes Bajaj Auto and gives us sheer heart attack - in the most delightful way possible - with a brace of Performance machines which have in one fell stroke completely taken Indian biking to an altogether new plane. Read on and you will understand what I am raving about!

GENESIS: Why do such a bike? The answer to the above query has been answered to a great extent in the opening paras but then credit this also to the fact that in Rajiv Bajaj, Indian industry now has a second motorcycle man at its helm (the first being Venu Srinivasan). The industry has been long run by people intent on making regular commuter machines and running on the straight and the narrow. There has been hardly any innovation, flair or radical thought in making bikes the way they are perceived in the developed world. Of course one needs cubic capacity in the developed countries. Keeping that aside, what Rajiv Bajaj and his team have done is transcend thought barriers to bring the Pulsar to life. There is no great earth shaking stuff on the Pulsar in terms of technology - but it involved selection of the right ingredients from the enthusiast point of view and packaging them brilliantly. The Bajaj Auto team offers no apology for sticking its neck out and making a bike far removed from the norm in terms of its character and make-up while at the same time endowing it with the drool factor which not very many bikes provide in toto.

I first caught sight of the Pulsar a month before Auto Expo 2000 when Rajiv Bajaj and R L Ravichandran personally showed off their new baby in the offing. The bike's potential was immense and apparent even then and it struck me strongly that for the first time we could be waiting for a good looking bike with Performance and handling to match. I was not ready to shout from the rooftops about the handling and Performance bit then but was fervently hoping that the production versions would have these two vital ingredients in ample measure. The answer is there in vivid detail on these pages. Apart from dreaming up the bike, Rajiv and team kept refining and redefining parameters on the product as well as the production systems. When Bajaj Auto laid out the Pulsars for the national media to ride (a day after the Kawasaki Eliminator launch in January this year), one was immediately struck by the inherent potential of the machine. However the specialist team preferred to delay the launch of the bike, slated for April, and reworked the carburation, handling and reliability. The Pulsar finally began rolling off the assembly lines at the Chakan facility on November 10, and judging by the behaviour and Performance of the bikes we have tested, the finished product has been well worth the delay.