The movie ‘Being John Malkovich’ is built around the idea that there is a portal which, if anyone enters, leads to inside of the mind of the actor John Malkovich. People could enter that portal and experience being John Malkovich.

Now of course, with random people entering and leaving his mind, John becomes curious and finds that portal. Once he finds it, he enters it and is lead into a paradoxical world where everyone is, himself. He finds himself in a restaurant , where everyone, including the waiter, the customers, the manager, is himself. As expected, John is quite stunned in the face of this odd situation.

What I have written above is how I can vaguely describe the odd feeling that I had in the initial few hours of being in the rider mania. With every one in this grand get together being a rider by passion, by appearance and by acts, I would say this was a carnival of all bitten by the bug of wanderlust.

Our decision to participate in the rider mania was dicey from the moment the idea popped up. This time of the year comes with a packed schedule for most people and thus it is hard to head out for 4-5 days straight. However, the occasion seemed important and thus we hung on to our decision to go.

We started off for Kiker Lodge, Ropar on 23rd Jan at 8am. We had planned to depart by 6, but ran late. We had to travel 650km from Gwalior to Kiker Lodge, but due to our late start and fog in the later in the night, we had to take a halt at Ambala. So, it was on the next morning that we reached the rider mania.

Apparently, every other group had already reached, we the late comers were offered to perform the ride-in, right away. At this time, the only thing that all of us had in mind was breakfast plus none of us had any idea what a ride-in was. So, we went straight through the cheering crowd of riders, having no idea what was happening and then head straight to our accommodation.

The next two days from here onwards, however were awesome. The place, the crowd, the motorcycles, food and activities pass time with, everything was in place to make up for a great time.

Before starting back, we were keen on not being late making it back on the same day. So, we started off early on 26th Jan and made it through the 650 km of riding finally making it back on the same day at 1opm.

Looking forward to the next rider mania and of course the numerous rides which we would have before that.