Their stunts do steal the peace of residents

Their stunts do steal the peace of residents

Monica Jha



Some roads are chocked with traffic but there are still a few stretches less travelled and, unfortunately, instead of being unique propositions of the area, they are the nightmares.
Residents have a valid reason to avoid these roads, especially during the weekends. The upmarket area with well-off families and stylish young crowd has given rise to problems of drag racing and wheelie riding especially in the dead of the night.
HIG Colony, 60-Feet Road near Central Excise office, and Dollars Layout are prime locations for this adventure sport.
"The stunts these kids indulge in are dangerous not only to themselves but also to the passersby. I do not understand what fun they derive by doing this senseless and noisy act and also endangering others' lives," says a vexed resident of HIG Colony, KN Krishnamurthy.
"These thrill-loving boys remove the silencers of their motorcycles and roar away kicking up a lot of pollution and deafening noise in the wake. The elderly people, the kids and the sick are particularly troubled," says Madhvirani, a resident of RMV II Stage.
"My brother once got injured in the drag race. He was not participating. He was just an onlooker. He was watching another boy do the stunts and the bike suddenly skidded and hit my brother badly," says Shambhavi Murthy, an HR executive with a software company and resident of Dollars Layout.
"I don't even want to imagine what happened to the biker but my brother could not walk properly for several months and had to undergo physiotherapy treatment," says Murthy.
"The local associations have failed to do anything about them while the police have turned a blind eye to this problem. The main reason for the police keeping silent is because most of these boys come from affluent families. For police, it is a futile exercise to register a case," says Vinita Thomas, a software professional and resident of HIG Colony. Many other residents of the area agree with Vinita.
But the boys who indulge in these stunts are unfazed. "I do not know why people complain. Yes, we do organise drag races; we do wheelies and stunts. But we do not trouble anybody. We choose roads that are not busy and do it in early mornings on Sundays when the whole area sleeps. I guess our elders need no reason to crib for. But they like doing this," says a young engineering student, without divulging further details about him.
It is an all-boys game where girls are a strict no-no, says he, adding all of his partners in the game are students or young working professionals from the area.
"A few of our friends from other parts of the city do join us sometimes but most of us are from this area. There are no women in our group. It's an all-boys' gang. Once a woman approached us to join but she backed out later," he says.