Pepperfry co-founder and CEO, Ambareesh Murty, who died of a cardiac arrest last night in Leh, in his last Instagram post on Monday had ironically and tragically said that God had refused to accept him as an ‘angel’ after he faced some motorcycle issues on his trip.
The entrepreneur was on a trip to Leh and was riding on the Manali-Leh highway, when except for gears 1 and 2 on his bike, the rest stopped working, he said in the Instagram video, shot on the roadside of the More Plains.
“If God ever got around to creating a heaven for bikers, all roads in heaven will look like this – flat, black tarmac, in the middle of a plane running for kilometres on end. This is the Moor plane in the middle of the Manali-Leh highway,” he began in the video.
He continued: “In the middle of the More plains, God will give angels the options to party. Angelic bikers partied, had picnics.”
“I tried to be an angel today but God had other plans for me. He basically refused to accept me as an angel,” Murty tragically said in the clip captioned: “I ride, therefore I am” and "Motorcycle Diaries: Why Me?"
He continued explaining the problem he soon encountered: “I started having gear troubles. I couldn’t access the third, fourth and fifth gears of my bike. So I was riding on gears one and two. I tried to science it, motorcycle maintenance, but then I did what Einstein would do. I picked up a large rock and hit my gear pedal with it and everything was fine after that.”
He added that before his gears started working fine, when he was riding downslopes, he was mostly riding on neutral and sometimes the bike was shut off. “My carbon footprint would have been the lowest,” he announced as “good news”.
Ashish Shah, Pepperfry's co-founder, announced the news of Murty's death at 51 on Twitter today.
Murty was an avid biker, trekker, and a man who had told Outlook Business a few years ago that if he didn’t go for a ride every 3-4 months, he would get “withdrawal symptoms”.
"I am told by everybody around me that I am a much better person after I come back from my bike trips. Therefore, I am also doing it for the greater good,” he had joked in an interview.
Even in the midst of the pandemic, Murty rode from Mumbai to Ladakh on his Royal Enfield Himalayan. The Pepperfry office in Mumbai too is adorned with trekking ropes and photographs of intrepid group adventures.
Also read: Pepperfry co-founder Ambareesh Murty dies of cardiac arrest
Murty also had a fondness for rock music and played bass in an in-house band. His eclectic interests extended to collecting Zippo lighters from Hard Rock Cafés around the world.
Murty's began his career 1996 with stints at Cabdbury, Levi's, Prudential ICICI AMC (now ICICI Prudential), and eBay before he co-founded Pepperfry, an online marketplace that sells furniture, in 2011.
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