Discovering VAHNA
A screen grab from the VANHA website.
I was in the waiting area of couches, chairs, and refreshments at Fay Myers while they were putting my new front tire on the V-Strom and changing the oil and I noticed this magazine there on the table. VAHNA it was called, and they had a bunch of issues. I had never heard of this so I picked one up to look at.
It’s a motorcycle magazine, one I had never heard of, and what a nice magazine. Super high-quality reproduction on heavy paper and perfect binding. (“Perfect binding is a bookbinding method where pages are glued together along the spine, and then a cover is wrapped around the glued spine, resulting in a softcover book with clean, trimmed edges”–per the AI search results.)
Opening it up I was amazed. More photos than writing, it was full-page-spreads and double-page spreads of fabulous photos of motorcycles, mostly out off-road. It was gorgeous. But the writing was really good, too. Heck, I pulled out my phone and shot pictures of several pages as a quick and easy way to save the writing that I could see would be great to use in the quotes I end this blog with each time.
I also noted why Fay Myers has all these issues sitting there: toward the back of each issue was a full-page Fay Myers ad.
So I was really interested. What the heck is this magazine? When I got home I sat down at the computer and searched. First of all I looked for the meaning of VAHNA. I expected it would be an acronym for some motorcycle trade organization. Nope. Here’s the AI explanation: In the context of Indian mythology, “vahna” refers to a creature or vehicle that serves as a mount for a god. It’s a Hindi word derived from Sanskrit “vaha,” meaning “to carry.”
OK, so that’s cool. What a great name for a motorcycle magazine. We do ride the mounts of gods. We all know this.
But still, what is this magazine?
It turns out that VAHNA is more than a magazine. They make films and host a film festival. They’ll be launching a podcast this summer. They had a film festival tour that came to Denver for two days in January but I never heard about it. Darn. I’m going to get myself on their email list.
And the magazine? I did some searching before I found their site and a lot of people were saying the magazine was no longer being published. But as far as I can tell they are wrong. Or maybe it has gone online only. Not sure. But the site has articles posted as recently as March 5, 2025.
You should definitely check this out. I’d suggest doing so on a desktop computer just so you can fully appreciate the photography–a cellphone screen just won’t do it justice.
So you can file this under “gosh Ken, thanks for telling me about this.”
Biker Quote for Today
Feet on the pegs, head in the clouds.
Tags: motorcycle magazine, VANHA
