BRAAP MODE!

It’s quick, light and gorgeous. It’s a dirt bike, after all. Or is it?

- Janak Sorap

I’ll be honest — I’m smitten by this motorcycle. Mainly because I have owned a bone-stock Hero Impulse for a good four years now and the only upgrades or mods if I can call them that have been a pair of auxiliary lights and a few stickers, you know the horsepower-addition ones. However, the motorcycle in question here, one that looks no less than a proper dirt bike, is an Impulse that has been reincarnated at the hands of Yogi Chhabria, the man behind YC Design, a motorcycle restoration workshop in Mumbai that also undertakes such one-off mod projects. An avid off-road enthusiast himself Yogi rides dirt bikes regularly and so knows what a motorcycle needs to fly on dirt.

One day, I found myself at his shop to collect the modded Impulse, and if you love motorcycles, you will never get bored at the place; at any given point, you are bound to bump into interesting motorcycles there. This time, there were four Yamaha RD 350s, one parked, the other getting some wiring work done, and the other two were complete restorations from the ground up with brand-new exhaust downpipes and mufflers being fitted. Besides these, there were other old British, Japanese and Italian machines as well that were patiently waiting for their turn to one day be restored to their former glory. While I was gazing at all these machines, Chhabria rode in on a TVS-Suzuki Shogun, his first motorcycle, that he had restored at the start of the year only to be stowed away for months as the whole world got quarantined.