Javeen Malik, 42, has turned the idea of customising bikes on its head. Take his Egg Bullet scooter for instance, which as the name suggests is a scooter powered by the Bullet’s engine or his 2011 spider-face bike rightly called The Black Widow.
While most bikers either look to make these mean machines meaner or go for a Harley Davidson or Chopper makeover, Javeen’s uniquely designed bikes stand out by treading the unconventional path.
Javeen is a Kottayam-based Enfield Bullet dealer. Selling Bullet bikes is Javeen’s business and customising them
his passion. And he has been on a winning streak ever since he started customising bikes for competitions in 2010, with makeovers as varied as his versatile interests in life that range from biking to cooking to politics. The Bullet enthusiast is a Congress loyalist and was a municipal councilor in Kottayam Municipality from 2005 to 2012.
It is not surprising then that at the Royal Enfield Rider Mania, the annual biker festival in Goa where bullet enthusiasts from across India congregate, Javeen’s bikes have won in the ‘Most Popular Bike’ category three times in a row (2010 to 2012) and in the ‘Best Customised Bike’ category (2011) as well.
This year, however, Javeen gave it a miss as he has been busy with the opening of a new Enfield showroom in Kottayam, tipped to be one of the biggest in Kerala. “The showroom is modelled on the motobike cafes in the West and will be a one-stop shop for Bullet enthusiasts. It would also have a cafe with a signature dish of my choice each day, which I would be making whenever I can,” he beams.
Javeen competed in Riders Mania for the first time in 2010 with 3C, a radically altered Bullet that hardly looked like one. The concept and make was fresh and was much appreciated wherever it was exhibited.
“3C stands for custom, classic and concept,” explains Javeen. The chassis, designed like a question mark, is what makes the look radical. Made of galvanised iron pipe, it doubles as the fuel tank. However, it was ‘The Black Widow’, the design he introduced in 2011 that swept the boards at Riders Mania, bagging both ‘The Best Customised Bike’ and ‘The Most Popular Bike’ titles. This time the tough Bullet look was retained but dollops of style was added.
“Having won the popular bike category in 2010, I was determined to do better and tried hard, scrapping chassis after chassis trying out different designs,” Javeen recalls. When he finally arrived at a design that satisfied him, he named it Black Widow, after the poisonous spider that eats it mate. “The bike had eaten enough chassis to be worthy of the name,” quips Javeen.
The Black Widow has a spider face complete with a nose created out of a Lambretta. The lights which are molded onto the fuel tank are the park lights of a Toyota. The handlebars are lowered down so that the rider had to lie low to ride it. The bike comes with front and rear mono-shock suspensions.
In 2012, Javeen went a step ahead to try out something out-of-the-box. The result was ‘Egg’, the Bullet Scooter—powered by Bullet’s engine or you could also call it a Bullet in a scooter’s cloak with a headlamp, indicators, handle, metre console and the front forks of a Thunderbird and a white body complete with a yellow yolk seat. The scooter won him a hat-trick in ‘The Most Popular Bike category’.