For some, a car that looks and feels like any other just isn’t good enough. They spend time and money customising, tweaking, creating their own unique rides. They’re the modders
The blistering heat of the day is just about giving way to the pleasant breeze from the sea. Versova jetty, though well within Mumbai’s city limits, looks more like a small fishing village. Its lanes are narrow and potholed, auto rickshaws and two-wheelers have to honk their way through the crowd, and loud conversations are everywhere.
Until a low, rhythmic thumpathumpathumpathump cuts through the hubbub. Heads turn. And then jaws drop.
Akshai Varde is used to this. His ‘Vardenchi’ is an eye-magnet. Heck, he likes a good look at her himself. “Every time I pass a building with a glass façade, I find myself staring at my own reflection!” The Vardenchi is his modified Royal Enfield Bullet. Chopper-styled, with an extended front fork and swept-back handlebars, it is all chrome and white, with shlokas from the Hanuman Chalisa in stylised English script painted on the body. The throng of gawkers that gathers at our photo shoot is testament to his modding skills. Standing out from the crowd is what it’s all about.
What’s an average red-blooded North Indian male to do to get his average ride stand out? One of the better known names in the National Capital Region is Arush Vohra’s Autopsyche, a small modding workshop in Gurgaon. He’s another perfectly normal looking man, but engine oil pulses hot through his veins. “As a kid, I used to spend my evenings in my dad’s workshop. I have been brought up among cars.” At 18, he sat for his IIT entrance exam and all he did was draw pencil sketches of cars. He acquired an automobile engineering degree from Western Michigan University, and in 2005 he started Autopsyche. Today, at 29, he’s done well. Autopsyche has created a niche in body kit design and manufacturing for almost all makes of vehicles, and he works on something like three to six cars a month, doing business worth Rs. 900,000 a month. Business is so good, in fact, that he finds very little time to modify his own Mitsubishi 3000 GT. “The concept is to make it look and run like a Ferrari and I have been working on it for more than a year now but I have only been able to do it up on the outside.”
Things you should know to modify the vehicles are:
(This story appears in the 16 April, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)