Cycling still finding its feet

I was standing in the foyer of the Downtown Independent movie theatre in Los Angeles, and though I was in shorts, T-shirt and baseball cap, I felt like a man in a tuxedo at a beach party.

Around me was a sea of tattoos, cycling jerseys, cleated shoes, T-shirts with edgy cycle graphics, two-tone cycling caps, and the occasional piece of cycling-related jewellery& a gold cog as a pendant. A cycle-chain bracelet around a wrist. And, no matter how scrawny or even pudgy the people were from waist up, their legs were all as if carved from marble or wood - scoops and scallops everywhere.

I was there for the Bicycle Film Festival, an event that left a big impression on me, but not because of the movies. It was the astonishing energy of this group of cyclists, and the experience of gasping at onscreen close calls between cars and bicycles in a theatre with 240 other cycle-crazy people.

On the pavement just outside was a bike-valet service. Three wooden poles rested on A-frames, from which patron's cycles were suspended by their saddles, facing in opposite directions. About three car-lengths of pavement could hold, at my guess, 150 bicycles, and still leave room for people to walk past. And, definite proof that this festival was organised by cyclists for cyclists: the bathroom counter was littered with a selection of deodorants and colognes, a large pile of paper towels on hand.

The audience, based on my informal visual survey of the clothing and the kinds of cycles, was largely an urban-cycling group. There was a preponderance of single speed and fixed-gear cycles (machines with no freewheel, just a cog) - the tool of a relatively new brand of urban warrior.

The group had a distinctly boho air about it, there was none of the shaven sophistication of a group of road bikers on carbon-fibre machines. Or the grizzled, easygoing air of a bunch of mountain bikers, Camelbak drinking tubes hanging down their fronts.

I'm stereotyping a little bit, but only in my fascination for a city's bicycling community so extensive that it has such diversity within it. I'm actively in touch with the burgeoning, but nascent, cycling scene in India, specifically in Bangalore. It's still finding its feet, and right now simply being on a bicycle by choice and not by necessity, makes you one of the gang. It's still at that naïve stage where it assumes everyone should get along just because they're on cycles.

As the market grows, and we realise that it takes all kinds, people will soon find corners in which to huddle. Right now, though, there's a tremendous pioneering energy on the scene: the excitement of being at the start of a movement. Bangalore will very soon see its first bike lane, with more to open across the city. Yes, some people argue that the segregation of traffic only fuels hostility between cyclists and other road users. But I think, at least for now, bike lanes just might encourage middle-class Indians to set their big-car dreams aside, and seriously think about this fast, silent, and above all elegant, way to get around.

"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." This quote by H.G. Wells is heard so often in cycling circles that it's quite the cliché. But out here, I'm sure I can be forgiven its repetition. Because when I look into the future and see, in my mind's eye, a theatre foyer full of edgy Bangalorean cyclists at a bike film festival, I do not despair for the future of the city.

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.