Saying s-o-r-r-y !

When I was a kid, I was notoriously known for my stubbornness. My stubbornness to not eat, to not sleep and to pick up trash from the streets. I had a thing for all things shiny on the roads. Golden cigarette packets, silver tobacco packets, broken pieces of coloured plastic and for other lustrous things my hands reached out hungrily. I would curl them in my little fingers, away from my mom's angry reach and silently tuck them into my skirt or pant pockets when my mom looked away. At other times, I was not so lucky and my mother would drag me to get me away from the roadside trash that for me were my little treasures.

For being treated so badly on the roads for everyone to see, I put up a brave fight, trying to run away from my mom's stronghold and in the process ended up scratching and beating her with my tiny hands. My little mind didn't comprehend why my mother won't let me pick those things up and hence I protested with all my might. My mother suffered a few tiny slaps on her legs and when she had me securely up on her waist, her hair got pulled and bare shoulders and neck were recipients of my scratches. My hands were tiny but my nails were quite sharp.

Reaching home, my mom upon surveying damage to herself and giving me another hearing, droned about my bad behaviour to my dad and granny. My dad was the other poor victim of my tiny hands and sharp nails. Though they were cut regularly, even my blunt nails did more harm and served as my weapons against the injustice the elders meted out to me. My dad suffered more than my mother. He always wore a vest in the home and every time I had been refused an expensive chocolate, toy and dress outside, I would come back home, remember the refusal and pinch and scratch on all his bare hands and neck. My dad suffered red scars and everybody pitied him and reprimanded me for the things I did. One of the things they said to me was "Say sorry !".

I could never bear to hear those two abominable words and they enraged me more than the refusal of chocolates, toys and shiny trash. My granny would coax me to ask forgiveness to my mom and dad and would try to make me say sorry. I wouldn't budge. Despite her threats with a rolling pin or a big stone, the word 'sorry' would never come out of me. My tiny mind had realised that 'sorry' was the wrong thing to say especially when I had been refused things and maltreated. My stubbornness to not say the word was one of the highlights of my childhood.

Fast-forward to twenty years later and I am a quite a sensible young woman (or so I think) who knows exactly when to say her sorry's and accept her mistakes. Growing up, I gave up on my stubbornness and learnt to say a lot of 'Thank you's' and 'Sorry's' and sometimes a lot more than necessary and was asked to shut up and not be so formal. My episodes of not saying sorry are often contrasted with how I am now and my family heartily laughs at my childhood notoriety.

Even though I am good mannered now, my family will agree that I am very much so only to the outside world. I have my temper and my family often is victim to its flares. This has earned me the description of 'Mouse outside, lion inside'. Every time my temper goes out of control, I realise my mistake after some time of its subsiding. And when I see my mistake in a clear way, I go and apologise and say my 'sorry'. I say it and truly mean it.

Nobody is safe from making mistakes. We, after all, are human beings and fallible. We will have our weak moments and our tongues will lash out unkind things or our actions will do more harm. But I think that when the unpleasant moments pass, we need to have a deep look at the events, review them, put ourselves in the other person's/peoples shoes and see clearly for ourselves. We need to keep aside our sense of ego. It is a potently damaging thing.

When we put aside our pride, only then will we even have a chance at realising our mistakes. What seems a mistake to others, might not be seeming so to you and hence the conflict. To get around it, we need to leave the place of prejudice in our mind, think from the other person's perspective and know the wrong from the right. A dear friend once told me that relationships are too precious to be damaged by an enraged mind and saying 'sorry' and asking for forgiveness and meaning it can make a whole lot of difference.

Sometimes, it's very disturbing to see elders not realise their mistakes and apologise to other elders that will make things better. Preaching to their children what they don't practise is very unsettling. I guess with elders, the ego has also gotten quite big and hence their inability to remove the heavy burden aside and see things in a different view.

I am not supporting the idea of apologising every time. Sometimes you can be right too in your stance and having a discussion and dialogue with the other person about the conflict will help in easing out differences. A review of things that are more important than petty fights like love and respect for one another will help settle matters faster. I am glad that I don't suffer much at the hands of a heavy ego. I can put mine aside most of the time and do without it as well.

Recently, my family has a new kid on the block and that's my niece. It's very amusing to see that she has a lot of traits common with me. Like me, she likes to be stubborn about eating and getting things done her way. She also has a flair for dancing, just like me. Another trait she shares with me, to everyone's surprise is her refusal to say sorry! Her notoriety and naughtiness are of the highest calibre the family has seen so far. I was quite naughty but my cousin brother was the epitome of extreme naughtiness. Sadly for my aunt and uncle, her stubbornness and naughtiness are two orders of magnitude greater than my cousin.

Not long ago she threw a big tantrum and my grandmother was a sorry victim of the plastic cup she threw out of her hands. It hit my grandmother by the side of her face. She was quick to run away from the scene. Once she was back we all coaxed her to apologise and say 'sorry'. She very much like me, didn't budge. Despite not saying sorry, she went up to her grandmother, saw the tiny scar her flying cup had left and pressed her small hands to it and caressed it. Apology, however, didnt escape her lips. I, however, got a way around to it. She loves saying her A, B, C, D's and spelling out the words and shouting them out to anybody who cares to hear like a-p-p-le, b-a-l-l, c-a-t etc. I crept to her, took her in my arms and ask her to spell out what I was saying. I spelled out S-O-R-R-Y and she followed and I revealed to her that the word she said was 'sorry'. She shouted the letters enthusiastically but after spelling out the word per se, she writhed from my grip, made a face and ran away.

Journeys

At the end of the IIT journey, a cycling trip to Kovalam and back

Journeys begin. They end too. We embark on a new journey every time we do something new. That way, we are on numerous journeys at the same time: doing new things, learning new skills, exploring our strengths, overcoming our weaknesses, travelling to new places or visiting the unseen nooks and crannies of the old ones. They end when they have to by the set time constraints or when we deem them to knowing what seemed new and unknown then, is now the familiar and the known. Journeys begin again when a new unknown appears on the horizon and we set out in its quest.

As I travel back to Bangalore on the Shatabdi express, having finished with the journey of pursuing a post graduation in Physics from IIT Madras, I am reminded about the travel to Chennai on the same train, two years back, when that journey had just begun. Two years have flown by and IIT Madras has been an eventful journey having many highs and lows akin to a roller-coaster ride.  These two years I have learnt a great deal, sat through amazing lectures and talks, lived in a beautiful campus, met some beautiful people and made them my friends for life. Home seemed dearer in the beginning but now the thought that I won’t be returning to the messy hostel room, to the bland mess food, to the hectic schedule of classes, assignments and projects, to the company of great friends and interesting people, is somehow unsettling.

My friends and I had known that the end of exams heralded the end of our journey here at IIT Madras and feared this unsettling feeling. In the little time we had left of our stay post exams, we decided to rid our minds of the thought and make the most of it.  One such thing we decided to do was to go on a long distance cycling trip.

Since some time I had noticed how cycling was a growing hobby among many; had come across many a Trek, Schwinn, and Decathlon on the roads and had thought about taking it up some time later as I was quite fond of cycling since childhood. The one thing I really loved doing on the first day of joining IIT amidst the crazy hustle of checking into the hostel and completing the admission process was buying a cycle. It’s another thing that I lost it within a few months due to my negligence and bought another one which didn’t get used much in the second year.

 A recent friend Santosh, who also turned out to be my distant relative (the world is really small)  was into cycling long distances, and when we got talking, he kept me abreast with his cycling excursions outside the city, trips within and about his recent purchase of an Aspect MTB.  Whenever he invited me to join him on some trip I was quite apprehensive as I was quite famous for my low stamina and didn’t feel confident that I could cycle such long distances. Amidst the hectic schedule of the semester, joining him never seemed feasible and I had the thought of doing such a trip pushed into the to-do list for the post-exam time. When the exams ended, me and my friends decided that doing a cycling trip would be the best thing to do. As I had been before, my friends too had apprehensions: not about their ability but about mine: as they well knew my feeble levels of strength. Still I persisted and promised that I wouldn’t faint on the way and finally we threw the cautions to the wind and decided to do this trip, come what may. I knew the perfect person who could give us an introduction to long distance cycling and after speaking to Santosh we decided to cycle to Kovalam beach, 27 kms away from Chennai on a Friday morning.

Santosh suggested that we rent the geared cycles for the trip from the Probikers store on OMR road.  The fact that a day’s rental would cost us 500 bucks had us look at cheaper rental place like JustBuyCycles. However a call to them at around seven in the evening made us realize that they had only one bicycle to rent out and our plan to go cycling the next morning seemed a near impossibility. Our desire to go on the trip we had planned was overwhelming and we decided to let price be damned and rent them from Probikers as planned initially.  An hour and a half later, we had our cool geared road, hybrid bikes and MTB’s and cycled back to the hostels through the traffic-laden OMR road. The number of people coming on the ride rose to fourteen as other friends decided to join us on their own cycles and also on borrowed Decathlon Mybikes. A few others who were really enthusiastic about the plan had to drop out due to other engagements like project viva’s, applications, poor health etc. By the time we got the bikes back, had dinner, packed fruits and glucose for energy sake and retired to bed, it was well past twelve. I hardly slept out of excitement for the upcoming trip. The ride scheduled to begin at four in the morning, due to the various delays(read falling asleep at 3 a.m., time spent in taking bath, packing water etc) began at five. We rode out of the Tharamani gate and onto our long distance cycling trip, a first for many of us.

With Santosh leading the pack on his Aspect MTB and Oswald Lobo guarding the rear on his Schwinn road bike, we cycled away on ECR road. The cycles were a joy to ride and we learnt the nuances of using the gears quite quickly. I tried to stay ahead and be in the middle of the group as I was wary of the fact that if I got slow, I would fall much behind the rear guard of Lobo and would feel lost being far behind the group. But my fears were unfounded and the group kept a good pace and with our cool cycles, speed was aplenty even with our modest pedaling efforts. We stopped after a few kms into the ride to have a selfie taken by Santosh using a selfie stick. By the time we stopped for a water break, it was daylight and well around 40 minutes into the ride. Santosh informed us that we had only covered 9 kms and we still had twice the amount to go which was quite low as we thought that after so much cycling we would have covered more than 9 kms. Putting our over-estimation aside, we began the ride again.

A blurry selfie on OMR road

Water and selfie break 

Kovalam calling !

It was an enjoyable ride along the roads outside the city as we went past places with good countryside views, came across some water canals and went over a bridge above backwaters as we neared Kovalam. As we reached Kovalam, we took the small village roads starting from Taj Vivanta that led to the beach. We reached the beach and finished our 27 kms ride sharp at seven.

Kovalam beach

Getting down from the saddles was a great relief and into the water we went to enjoy the lapping waves and the lovely sea-breeze.  Some of us took to standing on the rocks, others sat on the sand to enjoy the rolling waves washing ashore. One of us, Kaustubh, while standing on a rock with shells growing on it slipped and fell down when a big wave hit him. He got a bad cut on his knee from the fall and thanks to the first aid carried by Santosh and Lobo, the wound was cleaned and wrapped up. All this while two others in the group took to the beach like flies to a sweet and the rest of us were kept entertained by their antics. Let’s call them A and B for the sake of anonymity. A and B both did á la Salmaan Khan and having thrown their shirts aside, jumped and rolled in the waves. While they were busy a large wave started to carry away A’s flung shirt into the sea but A thankfully noticed it in the nick of time and saved his shirt. However B didn’t have such good fortune. While B’s shirt was being carried away, our cries didn’t reach him and while the wave carried it inward, one of the girls, Madhu, tried to rescue it by running behind it in vain. The wave was faster than her and the sea engulfed B’s shirt. B was left shirtless and all of us embarrassed as we didn’t want to ride back with a half-naked boy among our midst. With no spare t-shirts, Madhu had to part with her jacket to help B cover himself and she did so quite reluctantly to our amusement and while B donned the ladies jacket we were laughing our hearts away.  A few minutes later, one of the boys realized that he indeed had a spare t-shirt and B was given the men’s t-shirt while he handed back the used jacket to Madhu who was by now quite repulsed.

The cycles and us

Santosh left us early and headed back to IIT as he had lab work and a strict guide to return to on a weekday. Having enjoyed the beach to our hearts fill we decided to head back so that we reached IIT back before the scorching noon sun roasted us on the road. It was a good thing that since a few days the weather had turned pleasant in Chennai and the sun wasn’t burning down so hard. We dragged down the cycles from the sand and onto the road. The moment we climbed back on the saddles we realized how sore and numb our backsides had become due to the morning ride. With the hurt backsides we started the ride back home but the immediate destination was Sangeetha restaurant a few kms away as our stomachs growled and roared out of hunger.  After a filling breakfast of idlis, dosas, puris and fresh lemon juice to wash it all down we began the lengthy ride back again. The food and the liquids gave us a new-found energy and we cycled and cycled on. It drizzled for a short distance and riding at a good speed, with the wind blowing in our hair, and the drops tip-tapping on us was a pure joy!

On the ride to the beach and now while heading back, I hadn’t felt any weakness and was glad my stamina hadn’t buckled. I was riding well and the speed was indeed thrilling. It was a straight road and hence the group didn’t need much guidance from Lobo. At one point however we had to take a left turn. With good speed at our feet a couple of us were at the front end and another friend Prolay was much ahead of us. Lobo quickly sped up and asked Prolay to slow down as a change in the route was coming up. Lobo rode upto the point where we had to take a left turn and patiently waited and guided till the last one of us took the turn and then followed behind. Another small mishap happened when Lohith, speeding on the cycle while taking his hands off from the handlebars, lost his balance and fell down. He incurred some bad cuts and apart from a few, the rest of us didn’t know about his fall until much later. A few kms later we crossed a big signal and were now well within the traffic laden city roads.

A little distance into the city roads and one of us realized that the person B was not in the pack and that he was missing. We halted immediately and to everybody’s shock nobody remembered seeing him or riding beside him for quite some time. Simran recalled that the last time she had seen him was when he was riding carelessely and would have hit a car had he not swerved in the last minute. This had us scared and wondering if he didn’t take the left turn with us or didn’t cross the signal in the right direction. The sun had come out from the clouds now and in the scorching heat we waited for him anxiously to be traced as Lobo and Prolay went back in search of B. While we waited, and the two others were away in his search, B miraculously appeared riding towards us on the slip road. We heaved sighs of relief while laughing at the turn of events. B had indeed kept us entertained through out the trip. With the search people back, we rode back, while Ankush and Prolay kept a close vigil on B while riding close to him to prevent him from causing any more anxiety to us.  

Riding along the city roads our destination was near when we hit the OMR road. The group parted ways as some us who had rented the cycles had to return them to Probikers and then continue onwards to IIT, while the others took a detour and headed straight back to the hostels. We reached the Probikers store, gulped down some much needed cold water and handed over (albeit reluctantly) our road, hybrid and mountain bikes. It seemed incredulous that we had just cycled about 54 kms in a quarter of a day and having clicked some more pictures at the store for memories sake, we headed back to the hostels.

The cycling journey to Kovalam, courtesy Santosh and Lobo, had ended for the day but our love for such cycling trips had just begun. We were already discussing about doing such a trip again, while on our way back to the hostels.

Learning to Run

“Run as fast as I can, to the middle of nowhere” sings Pink in my headphones and I get the right boost to stop trotting and run the next few meters with new-found energy and enthusiasm. While Pink sings about her estranged love, I plead the tarmac to show me some love and stop being so hard on my legs.

Getting right to the point: I want to run. I want to run because I want to lose all that excess body fat I have piled on since high school. I was a lean kid till the end of eleventh grade but not so much thereafter. What added on to my weight was a combination of undesirable factors and my own stupidity.

I loved dancing ever since I was a kid but had never taken it up for learning the classical or the non-classical forms, primarily due to the lack of classes in and around my neighborhood. When an opportunity showed up in the eleventh grade, a mile away from my house, I immediately jumped at it. My mother was initially apprehensive and cautioned me that beginning the classes meant that I would have to keep at it as the chances of becoming fat post stopping a physical activity are generally high. She also recounted the story of another friend of mine who after discontinuing dance classes had indeed put on weight.

Paying no heed to her, I walked two miles to and fro, four times a week, to dance to the tunes of ‘thai-hath-thai-hee’. That one hour I spent learning dance (Bharathantyam) was the best part of my day. Sadly though, the evenings spent joyfully dancing seemed to bear heavy on me as the academic year wore on. The workload piled higher and the beginning of twelfth grade and increased coursework for the board exams loomed large on the horizon.

The joyful evenings turned exhaustive as after a tiring day at school, walking a mile away to dance started to feel like a burden rather than a joy. This coupled with my driving-phobic parents and their denial of providing me with a two-wheeler made sure that I started to grow weary of dance classes and when things got really hectic, I stopped them altogether. A year and no ‘physical activity’ later, I had put on weight, more so, on the lower part of my body and my mother’s fears, to her disappointment, did indeed come true.

Fast forward to now and I have really felt the need to slim down my lower body by exercising and eating right. I had been to the gym during under graduation and lost quite a bit of the weight that came from the sedentary lifestyle post dance classes and knew from there that running was the best cardio workout to lose the pounds and get lean. And so, in the last month of the previous year, I got real serious about starting to run to lose the excess percentage of body fat that I was carrying around.

The idea was good and the determination, rock steady. The only thing lacking was a good stamina on my part. I have never been active as far as sports are concerned and have always suffered from a lack of good stamina. The last time I ran was during a relay competition, when I was roped in forcefully due to the lack of girls representing the house I belonged to in school, and I had made a spectacular fool of myself then, running to the finish line well after the event was declared complete.

With low stamina in tow, I turned to the World Wide Web for inspiration. A few clicks after, Google was telling me, to my surprise, that people have indeed gone from being completely inactive for most part of their lives to running half and full marathons by steady training. My searches online led me to this very popular program called Couch-to-5K (C25K) which makes it possible for people like me to become runners through a gradual and steady amount of training.

Couch-to-5K is a program that involves nine weeks of workout at the end of which one will be able to run a 5K with ease. Each week consists of three workouts; each week consisting of alternating periods of running and walking for a total of thirty minutes. As the weeks increase, the walking intervals become shorter and running ones become longer, thus making your body adapt and learn to run continually.

I have read great success stories of people who have followed the C25K and want to make one out of my efforts too. It is not an easy program for complete beginners like me and will generally take more than the stipulated nine weeks for one to really run a 5K completely. There are apps on both the Android and Windows platforms that prompt the user about the intervals and are must-haves as they let you play music in the background.

I am currently in the fourth week of the C25K and nursing some injured shins. I have come to know that injuries will abound but rest, icing and continued efforts will make them go away. I believe that in a few months time I should be writing a post about how after all the minimal stamina, I ran a 5K.

Till then, I’ll keep running, hurting, resting, icing and running on.

A Movie and a Meteor

     

It was the fourteenth of February yesterday and as usual a day when love is celebrated in all its cliched and non-cliched forms all over the world. While abroad it’s a day when love is professed over cards, gifts, wishes and all things nice, here in India if you are out celebrating, the chances of being harassed by a big group of people wearing saffron are quite high.

I began my day by jogging with my friends in the morning as these days I am trying to overcome my utter lack of stamina and learn to run by following this hugely popular program called Couch-to-5K (C25K). After a draining session I returned to my room and called up my parents to wish them Happy Valentine’s Day as theirs was a troubled-yet-successful love story and also to tell them how much I indeed love them.

Then on it was just another weekend to catch up on hitherto untouched study work and assignments except that I eagerly looked forward for the night as the movie ‘Boyhood’ was playing in the Open Air Theater here at IIT Madras. When ‘Boyhood’ was first released I was smitten by the concept of filming in real, over a course of 12 years to chronicle the story of a boy growing up and had a great desire to watch it. The months of November and December went past in exams and spending soft sunny days and cold nights at home in Bangalore, amidst lots of good food and Boyhood was forgotten.

I started on my final semester here in January and again got reminded of the movie during random bouts of web surfing and was waiting for it to be screened here in the campus. So it was only natural that I became very excited when the mail about its screening finally arrived. And so sharp at eight after a hurried dinner me and my friend made our way to see the much awaited movie.

Less than halfway into the movie and I realized that my excitement was for nothing. The movie dragged on slowly showing how a small boy grew through his parents troubled and divorced marriage, through a mom whose second marriage turned abusive, through a super-smart and hardly affectionate sister, through teenage explorations of dating, alcohol, and sex, through his passion and talent for photography and through the minutes and hours and on it went.

While the boy grew up, I grew restless and my eyes involuntarily turned to the clear skies overhead; over the shining stars of Canis Major, Orion and Auriga constellations. While I narrowed my eyes to identify the faint constellation above the big screen a bright meteor about the magnitude of the star Sirius fell across in a small arc and my joy knew no bounds. If it hadn’t been for the people surrounding me I would have jumped up and did a small celebratory dance!

It’s been a long time since I saw a meteor as I am always either under clouded skies or there has been no opportunity to go on a stargazing trip as I used to in my undergraduate and high school days in Bangalore. The bright meteor reminded me of the bright, huge fireball me and my school friends had witnessed at the Kavalur Observatory back in 2010 when we had just graduated from high school.

And then after a while the meteor had fallen, my eyes went back to the movie where the boy now was graduating from his high school and was going away to college. The movie and the meteor put together took me back to the days in 2010 when me and my friends had just graduated high school and were well on our way to get into the real world through the first stepping stone that was college.

I sat through the rest of the movie disappointed as my expectations were very high than what the movie was offering to satiate them. I was overjoyed with having seen a meteor and went around making my disappointment known to people after the movie, as all I saw was a boy grow up from a child to a teenager and finally become a young adult with all his experiences along the way that are commonplace to me and you.

I awoke today morning and while I pondered the previous night’s movie and the happy sighting of a meteor, I realized that my disappointment at the movie was baseless. I did laugh when the boy did silly things, I sympathized with him when he had troubles with his family, with friends and a broken relationship, I identified with him all the frustration and confusion that teenage brings about and I saw a reflection of myself in the growing up kid and I was reminded of me and my friends graduating as young adults from high school and moving thereafter to college.

We all go to a movie to take a break from the monotony of our lives and to feel the excitement and rush of an unknown eventful something happening to someone but feel let down when the movie is itself a reflection of our rather uneventful lives. Thinking back to yesterday’s night I realized that the movie was not to be casually enjoyed but it had to be experienced and identified with.

Our lives go on with all the commonplace growing up we have to do, commonplace struggle we have to face and sometimes the rather uneventful course of our lives, is marked with happy or sad or shattering or amazing things that streak past us, like a meteor does occasionally across the sky !