Rajeev Khanna Head, R.K. Consulting He bought a 1340 cc Fat Boy Harley after cult motion pic T2 popularised it. Khanna even has a 1945 750 cc Harley parked at the office.

SELECTION After Hour

It's a lazy Sunday morning on Bangalore's 62-kilometre Outer Ring Road and the traffic is sparse. The noise isn't-there's the rich, almost sexual throb of eight 750 cc-plus engines chugging in tandem. This is where MOB rules. The name may intimidate, but the eight-member strong Motorcyclists Of Bangalore is as far removed from the beer-and-tattoo violence of the Hell's Angels as the soft-pop of Al Stewart is from the metallic exuberance of Black Sabbath. All eight are white-collar men in their late thirties and early forties, not very different from typically greying Harley customers in other parts of the world. Here, style gets preference over speed. Accessories are in. And much like noblemen indulging in their favourite pastime of equitation, the eight put their bikes through their paces. One of the eight is Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the 37-year-old Chairman & CEO of BPL Innovision Business Group, cruising along Ring Road in his 95th anniversary-just for kicks, Harley is celebrating a century of existence this year-Ultra Electra Glide, a 1,300-cc specimen. The bearded six-footer's Harley even boasts a four-speaker music system the man has affectionately dubbed "The Tower", and cruise control to boot. "I wear a full-face helmet on Sundays so that people don't recognise me," he says. That's perfectly understandable.

Fame, evidently, can't stop the almost primal desire of some successful men to be one with the road. The market may be replete with 100-cc bikes, ersatz cruisers, even a genuine power bike or two, but nothing, I repeat, nothing, comes close to the sheer thrill of straddling a hog. "A Harley is the Rolls-Royce of motorcycles," gushes actor Sanjay Dutt (actually, we featured the 44-year old toughie here because he is CEO of a company named White Feather Films) who rides his blue 1,600-cc Softail Classic four times a week, mostly at night. "The rest is just Jap c**p." That's more or less the sentiment displayed by two Hell's Angels when actor Mickey Rourke, who was keen to be considered part of the gang, presented them with Kawasaki bikes. They trashed them. Or so goes a story that has all the makings of apocrypha.

It doesn't need a shrink and several hours of psychoanalysis to figure out why business-types (or, for that matter, others) love big bikes. A car, after all, is just a car. A bike is a way of life. And the experience of revving it up on a big bike, vouch hog-lovers, is far more real than aseptic car rides. Which is perhaps why Sameer Thapar, the Delhi-based CEO of JCT Mills, and one of Dutt's best buddies-he was gifted a Harley by the actor-rides to the gym or to Delhi's very own patch of historical green, Lodhi Gardens for a run. The 38-year old has even decked his bike out with saddlebags and a chrome eagle claw stand. The twin-engined beauty (with a bod) stands by the porch at Thapar's 1.5-acre house in Central Delhi.

Sameer Thapar CEO, JCT Mills He rides his Harley to the gym or to the Lodhi gardens for a run and has decked it up with saddlebags and an eagle-claw stand

Mumbai-based interior decorator Jimmy Mistry (actually he heads a Rs 52-crore firm and features elsewhere in this magazine in his capacity as a new new entrepreneur) does one better than Thapar-he rides his vrsca v-rod cruiser in to work on Saturdays. He recently rode it down the city's heaving Lamington Street to meet with a client who was putting up a multiplex. The man gawked, "but then things settled down," grins Mistry. The gawking bit is only to be expected given the Harley's distinctive roar. Just ask Parvez Damania, now a director on the board of the Sahara Parivar. Three years ago, he bought a Harley in Dubai but "whenever I took it out, people were deafened by its strange noise." He takes it out less frequently now.

Delhi-based Rajeev Khanna-he heads R.K. Consulting-has no such misgivings. He bought a 1,340 cc Fat Boy Harley after cult motion pic T2 popularised it. Khanna even has a 1945 750 cc Harley permanently parked at the office. And like a true fanatic he rattles off all the Harley gear he owns-leather jacket, boots, cap, a Zippo with the bar-and-shield logo. That's an attitude that belongs as much in the Oakland hog (Harley Owners Group) as Delhi. Own the road, it screams.