Cristina Bacchetti, Journalist and Tester, tells us about her trip to India with her Forcite
MK1S

Proceeding on the opposite side - for us Europeans the 'wrong' side - of the road, dodging animals, huge trucks, carts, pedestrians... Driving in India is a unique experience which, at first, causes a lot of difficulty. There is no way and there is no time to enjoy the beauty that flows alongside the long black asphalt ribbons that cut the Rajasthan desert in two.

The first impact with this boundless country is emotionally strong: poverty cannot be hidden and for those like us, perhaps without even realizing it, who live in a condition of appreciable ease, it is difficult to look beyond. The first few hours in India were demanding, for driving, for emotion, for the difficulty in accepting that a reality so unjustly different from ours really exists. “Another world”, in the truest sense of the word.

I observed and observed, with the visor of my MK1S open to fully breathe the atmosphere of small villages where my eyes crossed smiles and kindness, and the eyes of children, unforgettable, curious and dreamy on my shiny Royal Enfield. It was they, the local people, who made that sense of unease that had chained me in the first part of the trip. It was the smiles, the kindness, the hospitality of those who live their condition with serenity and gratitude towards life.

In India everything flows, you enter the flow of life and let yourself be carried away, with
spirituality, giving importance to the person and his soul, venerating an animal like the cow because it gives milk not only to its puppies but also to other living beings. And so it becomes important, you cannot kill it, simply when it is no longer able to give milk it is abandoned, free to end its life as it sees fit, however respected and fed.

Everything in India has a spiritual and romantic declination, everything flows with a precise order that seems chaos to us, but chaos isn't.

Traveling 500 kilometers a day on these endless roads, interrupted only from time to time by small inhabited villages, gives you reason to think. How much we have, how uselessly we complain, how important it is to be 'on the right side of the world'. Banality? Sure. To which, however, we do not give the right weight in our daily life.

I came back from India with an extra baggage of awareness. First of all, that everything can be done: if I drove there, I can do anything!

What about my Forcite? Always comfortable despite the whole day spent in the saddle, from 5 degrees in the morning at dawn to 30 at midday. An excellent travel companion, with the plus of being able to take home pictures and memories thanks to the integrated cam… in complete safety.

And maybe even a record: the first MK1S in India!