Yezdi: The bike that made your dad cooler than you

Boman Irani and Anupam Thareja, the duo behind reviving the iconic bike, talk about reinventing the classic brand for today’s millennial Indian consumers…

“I had a cousin called Yezdi. And when I was a kid, I was extremely jealous he had a motorcycle named after him and not me!” says Boman Irani, setting the tone for the rest of the conversation about the Yezdi — the iconic bike recently revived under the Classic Legends banner. Irani, Boman Irani (L) and Anupam Thareja the chairman and MD of the Rustomjee Group, along with Anupam Thareja, co-founder, Classic Legends, are riding high after having recently introduced the Yezdi in three variants to millennial Indians.

Irani and Thareja, of course, are no strangers to relaunching bikes from the ’60s and ’70s to the current generation. In 2018, the duo, along with Mahindra Group’s chairman Anand Mahindra, relaunched the Jawa motorcycle in India. And now they’re following suit with the Yezdi. “We get our motorcycles outsourced and produced by the Mahindra factory. We are the designers,” Thareja says.

A slice of history Irani is of Persian descent, with his ancestors hailing from Yazd in Iran. As a homage to the province, his father, Rustom Irani, founded Yazdani & Company, a business that traded in everything from Bluebird toffees to cookies. Along with his partner Farrokh Irani, he went on to establish Ideal Jawa – a brand that retailed licenced Jawa motorcycles (originally hailing from the Czech Republic). However, from 1971 onwards, the ‘Jawa’ brand name had to be discontinued, leading to a renaming exercise. And Yezdi was born. However, it wasn’t just a simple name change; what then bikers saw in the Yezdi was also the ‘Indianisation of the Jawa, albeit in a more rugged | avatar.

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