Aman might be known by the car he drives, but nothing announces you have ‘arrived’ like landing up in an eye-catching double-decker bicycle. Yes, a bicycle. For entrepreneur Uday Thapar, it is just one of the many in his collection of unique modified bikes that turn heads and spark a conversation.
Like another cycle with a reclining, specially designed car seat in place of the standard bicycle saddle. The riding posture is more sofa-chilling than Tour de France-crouching. “It is the most comfortable bicycle I have ever made,” says Thapar.
On the streets of bustling Ludhiana, and wherever he goes, this 40-something’s wheels are a sight to behold. And he has as many as 20 of them. Like the tandem bicycle he crafted, which he co-rides with his wife Divya and daughter Ashmita to explore the narrow bylanes of the old quarter of Ludhiana (There’s even a reverse tandem cycle that he crafted, where his wife will have to sit facing backwards―perhaps useful during a tiff!) Or the uniquely designed cycle trailer to ferry his Labrador Retrievers (he never has a tiff with them) to his farmhouse outside the city. The problem, Thapar quips, was that the doggies love the ride so much that it’s a herculean task to get them out of the trailer.
On one with a car seat
Thapar’s love for cycles started when his father gifted him one when he was in class four. He used it to extensively explore his hometown as well as the villages nearby. After college, he joined his father’s business of making chain covers and mudguards for cycle biggies, picking up useful expertise along the way. A few years later, he started his own factory to make components for motorcycles and tractors.
With his wife, Divya, on a reverse tandem bike
It was the year after Covid-19 hit that Thapar started tinkering with cycle designs. “Anything that came to my mind, I started experimenting with,” he says. Some worked, while some flopped, like a quad bicycle where riders can sit side by side.
On a bike with a trailer for his dogs
Even the hit double-decker model took Thapar six months to make from scratch. He welded an additional frame onto a standard cycle to provide extra height. This, even with the staff at his plant telling him, “Sir, so many ready-made bicycles are there in the market! Why are you wasting your time on this funny cycle?”
But seeing the public reaction, Thapar feels it was worth the pain. He has installed a speaker in the front and two panniers and a sticker with his Instagram handle at the back, and takes the cycle out for a spin in the evenings. Curious locals follow him in cars and bikes, taking photos and videos. Pedestrians wave at him, some shout out “balle balle”, while some have been known to drive alongside and quip, “Paaji, how is the weather up there?”
“Bicycles do not have a window glass or a barrier like cars have, so you connect with people on the roads easily,” he says. Thapar also has compact, foldable bikes which he has taken on trips abroad. Once, on reaching Beijing, his tour operator had arranged a bus from the airport to the city. Thapar, however, simply unfolded his cycle and reached the hotel himself, tasting some local cuisine along the way and doing some sightseeing on his own.
With all the one-of-a-kind cycles in his collection, Thapar laughingly admits he finds it “extremely difficult to maintain all of them”. Not that it will stop him―he recently added three electric bicycles to his stable, and is already dreaming of custom-building a caravan on a cycle to do self-sustaining tours across the country with Divya. “Life is good on a cycle,” he says.