Thrill, excitement or insanity: What drives bikers to perform stunts?

New Delhi: For the past few years, Delhi has witnessed some bizarre episodes of bikers performing dangerous stunts on city roads in the wee hours. They perform various stunts on their bike putting their lives and those of other commuters at stake. They generally move in large groups ranging from 30 to 50 bikers. These bikers sometimes face terrible accidents and they are seldom detained by the Police.The latest incident of bike stunt going wrong is of New Delhi's Saturday night incident. More than 40 bikers were indulging in hooliganism at Delhi's Le Meridien roundabout when Police control room got a radio message. As soon the Police reached the area all the bikers started escaping but some started pelting stones on PCR vans. According to Police, some policemen got injuries by stone pelting and in return, some policemen fired at the errant bikers claiming one biker's life and bullet injury to another.. Now a debate is going on in the media on whether police's action was justified. We will not go into that debate here but will try to figure out what makes bikers perform dangerous stunts on their bikes. It was in 2004, when Bollywood experimented in showing stunts on the big screen. It was the then hot favourite John Abraham who was chosen for the role of biker thief who performed various dangerous stunts in the movie. When coming out of the cinema hall I noticed some bikers trying to perform some stunts shown in the movie copying John Abraham or for the thrill. Since then the focus of entertainment industry moved towards stunt-maniacs. A well known entertainment music channel launched a show named ‘Stunt Mania' which got handsome TRPs. In the show, participants who were professional bike stuntmen competed with each other for the title. They performed different deadly stunts in each episodes. Then comes the advertisement industry, I saw an ad of Bajaj Pulsar in which the bikers performed various stunts done with Pulsar. Bajaj claims in the ad that Pulsar is India's sports bike. From that ad bikers may have taken inspiration of buying the Pulsar and performing stunts on it. Some bikers say that they think its cool to do stunts. Whatever said and done. But this 'cool thing' is claiming lives and only we can stop it.