Enviously green!

Green, they say, is the colour of envy and man are many going to be envious of the latest Bajaj Auto offering? Having made its mark (and its money) in the motorcycle segment with performance - spelt as P-U-L-S-A-R, the Pune-based bike maker is now firing on twin cylinders, literally! Our cover story might have already given the game away but then in the India of the 21st century, performance is as much a driver as is affordability and ease of operation.

When one gets into the superbike mould, you start counting horsepower per lakh while kmph takes precedence over kmpl! Hitting the sweet spot then for a bike maker with performance as its credo means you need to have more horses for as few lakhs as possible, get the kmph right into the seriously fast zone while yet having kmpl to enjoy as well as stay relevant in the real world. No doubt then that green indeed is the colour of envy and maybe that is why all Kawasakis from the late 1960s onwards have sported this shade as the official colour of the brand.

Green is also the colour of envy for performance biking from now on and it comes coupled with Bajaj Auto's value for money mantra factored into the package. For a bike with a Rs 2.7-lakh sticker tag, this can be huge if you compare it to a Rs 70,000 Pulsar 220 DTSi (the performance benchmark by a long margin in India) but when you have superbike slaying performance in a compact package, then the Rs 12-lakh plus Yamaha R1s and Honda Fireblades have their work cut-out. Especially so because for years Kawasaki sold this bike in Europe and the US without any hint on the machine that said it was a 250, everyone thought it was a 600! I can already see many rivals turning, no not just green with envy but red in the face!
Jokes aside, the fact remains that India is changing fast and in the motorcycling scene the one firm that is twisting the throttle to the max is the one who is charging ahead with mindshare. Now lets await the larger capacity Kawasakis and of course yes, the KTMs which Bajaj now has a sizeable interest in.