What Does Independence Mean
When Captivity Sits Inside Us?

Some years ago, when Biker Radio Rodcast was still a hatchling, we came across a Facebook post. The author was a rider. And a poet.

He had shared a photograph of a mountain.

On the other side of it, somewhere beyond the ridge, was another world. Another people. And he wondered what it would be like to ride over there.

Not to conquer it.

Not to make a point.

Just to meet the people on the other side. Perhaps sit down with them. Have a cup of tea.

It was an almost disarmingly simple thought.

And it caused a bit of a storm.

There were flowers. And brickbats. Perhaps more brickbats from fellow riders — people who shared his road, but not his willingness to ride across that particular divide.

That stayed with us.

Not because people disagreed. Riders disagree about everything. Motorcycles, helmets, tyres, oil, routes, brands, riding styles. Sometimes we can turn a conversation about a spark plug into a theological dispute.

What stayed with us was the strange contradiction. Why should the desire to meet someone on the other side of a mountain be threatening? And why should it be particularly threatening when the person making the suggestion was one of us?

Perhaps because the mountain wasn't really the problem.

The invisible line was.

And perhaps more importantly, the word “them.”

It is an extraordinarily powerful little word.

Them.

It allows an enormous number of assumptions to be packed into a single syllable.

We have become rather good at it.

Before we meet someone, we increasingly want to know who they are. What they believe. Where they come from. What they vote for. What religion they belong to. What language they speak. Which community they identify with. Which side of whatever argument is currently raging they occupy.

And then, armed with this information, we decide how much of ourselves we are prepared to reveal.

The motorcycle does something rather curious to this arrangement.

You meet another rider on the road. You don't know their politics. You don't know their religion. You don't know their income. You don't know their caste, profession, social-media tribe or family history.

You see the motorcycle.

You see the rider.

You wave.

Someone has a puncture. You stop. Someone is lost. You help. Someone has run out of fuel. You share what you have. Someone looks exhausted. You ask if they're alright.

The biography can come later.

The human being arrives first.

Perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts of motorcycling.

It gives us an identity that we choose. Not one we were born into. Not one assigned to us. Not one inherited from a history we had no part in writing.

You can choose to be a rider.

And suddenly, a stranger becomes one of us.

It doesn't matter that they are riding a motorcycle worth ten times yours. It doesn't matter that they come from a city you've never visited. It doesn't matter what they believe.

For that moment, there is a road. There are two motorcycles. And there is an understanding that needs no introduction.

That is a rather beautiful contradiction.

Motorcycles are, after all, deeply tribal things. We divide ourselves into cruisers and adventure riders, commuters and tourers, café racers and superbike riders, Royal Enfield people and... well, everybody else.

We can be remarkably territorial about our machines.

And yet the larger tribe — the tribe of people who ride — can dissolve those distinctions in an instant.

Perhaps because riding reminds us of something we seem to forget rather easily when we are standing still:

we are capable of encountering a person before encountering their identity.

And that matters.

Because identity isn't inherently the problem. Identity gives us belonging. It gives us history. It gives us language, memory, family, culture and community.

The trouble begins when identity stops being something we carry and becomes something we use to decide who deserves to stand beside us.

And perhaps nowhere is this more loaded than in the relationship between India and Pakistan.

The dates themselves are almost an uncomfortable coincidence.

The 14th of August. The 15th of August.

Two countries celebrating independence on consecutive days. Two countries born out of the same extraordinary and traumatic moment in history. And generations of ordinary people who have inherited stories, wounds, suspicions and fears that began long before they were born.

History matters.

Of course it does.

But what happens when history becomes the only introduction we have to another human being?

What happens when them arrives before the person does?

This isn't an argument about borders. Borders have their place. Countries have their histories. People have their memories.

This is about something much smaller.

And perhaps much harder.

What happens when two human beings meet before their identities do?

The road has a curious way of answering that question.

It crosses boundaries without asking permission. It takes us into places where we don't know the language. It puts us beside people we would probably never encounter in the ordinary choreography of our lives.

And sometimes it leaves us with no choice but to ask for help.

Or offer it.

The road makes strangers useful to one another.

And usefulness has a funny way of becoming familiarity.

Familiarity, sometimes, becomes friendship.

Perhaps that's why motorcycles can create communities that would seem unlikely anywhere else.

A banker and a mechanic. A student and a professor. A CEO and a delivery rider. A Hindu and a Muslim. An Indian and a Pakistani.

Two people who might disagree profoundly about almost everything.

And yet, somewhere on a road, one can still pull over for the other.

Perhaps that is not a trivial thing.

Perhaps it is a clue.

Years after that Facebook post, the contradiction it exposed stayed with us at BRR.

It made us wonder whether a riding community could be something more than a place to talk about motorcycles.

Could it also be a place where we talk about the things that make us uncomfortable? The things we disagree about? The things that are usually reduced to shouting matches between opposing camps?

And so came the idea of an annual keynote followed by an AMA around contentious subjects.

Not because we expected everyone to agree.

Quite the opposite.

Perhaps the point was to discover whether we could disagree and still remain in the same room. Still listen. Still be curious. Still ride together afterwards.

Because perhaps that is what a community ought to be capable of.

Not agreement.

Proximity.

The ability to remain close enough to another human being to discover that disagreement doesn't necessarily make them an enemy.

Which brings us, eventually, to independence.

Every August, we remember the breaking of one kind of captivity. The freedom from rule by somebody else. The right to determine our own direction.

But there are other forms of captivity.

Some are inherited. Some are taught. Some are reinforced by the people around us. And some, if we're honest, we build ourselves.

The boundaries we never drew but defend anyway. The prejudices we inherited and never questioned. The identities we guard so fiercely that we forget they are identities. The assumptions that make a stranger them before we've even heard them speak.

And so perhaps, on a day when we celebrate freedom, there is another question worth asking:

What does independence Mean When Captivity sits inside us?

Perhaps it means the freedom to question what we have been told. The freedom to cross an invisible line. The freedom to meet someone before deciding what they represent. The freedom to discover that the person on the other side of the mountain is not a category.

They're a person.

Perhaps even a person who might sit down with you.

And have a cup of tea.

Maybe that's what the rider in that old Facebook post was really asking.

Not whether the border could be crossed.

But whether the distance between us and them had to exist in the first place.

And perhaps that's what motorcycles have been quietly teaching us all along.

The road doesn't ask who you are. It doesn't ask which side you're on. It doesn't ask what you believe.

It just opens.

And perhaps independence, in its most personal sense, is the courage to take that road.

Happy Independence Day.

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listen…connect…ride on…