Walk like a Camel

Do you remember, sometime in the mid 80s, listening to The Bangles' song "Walk Like an Egyptian"? - fast peppy number, makes you go foot thumping? 

Anyway, so there I am, trying to get myself in some shape (round IS a shape I know but ....) and have started hitting the gym in my complex a little bit more often than I have hitherto. Why, I even went ahead and signed up with a "personal trainer" who continues to remain optimistic that I will "improve" my attendance. 

So the routine goes like this, on those days that I actually end up at the gym... Sailesh, my p.t tells me to "warm up" for a few minutes (little realising that my walking down 36 steps from the second floor, and the 25 metres to the gym IS my idea of a warm up). 

Next comes the dreadmill, oops, treadmill - where I stumble, walk, run, jog, sprint around for all of 15 minutes by the end of which just as I am about to collapse from a cardiac arrest (proof that insurance brokers do have a heart!) and am about to stumble off in one heap Sailesh creeps up on my wrong side, taps me on my left shoulder and speaks those words of encouragement "Aur paanch minute karo", gives me a smile like Dracula, and walks away.... so, five minutes more, huffing, puffing and blowing the gym down. To my right and to my left are others, of all ages, and both genders all blithely doing their thing, without breaking a sweat while I look as if I've just stepped out from a bathtub and into a sauna. 20 minutes done and I crawl my way to my water bottle like a French Foreign Legionnaire who's hit an oasis after 2 weeks across a barren desert... my breathing is ragged, my sweat rivers its way down my face and chin to form a pond on the floor as I wipe myself dry. 

I smile weakly at a senior citizen who's pumping iron when my p.t strides up to me and gives me a well meaning friendly slap on my back sending me almost sprawling, a manoeuvre that I cunningly disguised to appear as if I've moved to the leg press section. Under his hawk eye I struggle, pushing, lifting, pressing and doing unimaginable things that my sane mind tells me "Sats, you're committing suicide!" - Sailesh, my fellow convict in aiding and abetting suicide, keeps chipping in with an occasional "Sabaash, bahut badiya" while I make faces at the mirror image of myself, expressions contorted in equal parts of pain and rage... 3 sets of 20 each and I am spent. Mercifully, Sailesh tells me to rest for (unmercifully) 2 minutes...

Those 2 minutes are over in 15 seconds and the man is back, pulling me to my feet to do that one thing that makes him delighted - LUNGES! In all my years of school punishments I thought I had seen it all. Kneeling, stand-up-on-the-bench, stand outside the class, caning, etc. I had missed out on this. Lunges, an activity designed by some Scottish Presbyterian school master, with malicious intent to make an unsuspecting man come to an intimate knowledge of the muscles located on back of his thighs as well as on the front, in fact designed to make the muscles on the back shake hands with the muscles in the front and then those two sets of muscles begin to have a long dialogue with each other leaving you totally ignored while you scream in agony... and just when I think that this can't get worse it actually does... lunges again, this time with 10 kg dumb-bells to add a certain gravity to the torture.

By now all thought of suicide has fled from the deepest, darkest recesses of my mind, replaced by an overpowering urge to inflict my rage on poor, unsuspecting, smiling Sailesh. And had it not been for the fact that just then, at that critical juncture, he tells me "Abhi aap relax ho jao, shavaashan kar lo" (in fact, come to think of it, I think he IS an mind reader!)..... I go and curl up in a corner, defeated, like a dog that's been hit by a speeding car. 

And lying down, contemplating the sheer white ceiling, pondering the mysteries of diabetes (which is why I am putting myself through all this bull!) and the meaning of life.... just when it seems that life is not all THAT bad, I see his face looming, disjointedly, over me as he says optimistically, "Come back tomorrow morning!" 

I get up on all fours, before realising that I am a biped. Attempt to stand upright, collect my water bottle and towel and walk out.... I've discovered that I seem to have an extra joint between my hips and my knees, and another between my knees and my ankles. Like an arthropod I walk, clumsily, back to my building.

Neighbours watching this from the sheltered spaces on their balconies or from behind curtained windows might well wonder - who is this, walking like a camel. 

Mea culpa - it is I!!

Role Models

I'm driving down to office, last week Thursday, a reasonably free road not too much traffic thank God. On that stretch of road, close to my office, something - a sudden, slight blip, out of the corner of my eye, barely registers. Huh?! What's that I saw, I ask myself.... 

No, it couldn't have been that!?! I shake my head and move on... but, a few metres ahead I succumb and take a U turn. 

Have not done this too often before- in fact, just once before do I remember having taken a U turn to go back to gaze/gawk. 

Marbles. Not the Italian or Makrana type marbles, those used in the Taj Mahal and such other places. I'm talking of marbles, those little, shiny, glass tiny balls/spheres that we've all grown up playing with, remember?

So, there was this little guy, perhaps around 5 or 6, dressed in a school uniform - red short trousers, a red & white check shirt, standing on the pavement. A school bag strapped to his shoulders. Hands on his waist, akimbo, and watching with intense concentration.

Watching, with intense concentration at an elderly woman, perhaps around late 60s or early 70s. Grey haired. Dressed in a 9 yard saree, draped in that traditional manner tucked up between her legs (in what, my wonderful friend Sunil Khandkar would describe as "divided India"!). Perhaps his grandmother, chaperoning the little man to/from school.

Anyway, this young lady, all of 70, was squatting on her haunches on the road, her thumb firmly positioned on the pavement, middle finger stretched taut and straight, one marble positioned at the end of that finger as she pulled it back with the fingers of her other hand. And she let go, SMACK the marble hit another on the pavement a little distance away and went BOOM/CLANK or whatever.

The young man clapped in joy, mouth agape in a small O. Grandma gave a toothless grin, gave him a playful slap on his butt, heaved herself up, gathered the marbles and off they went..... and I sat, and wondered.....

Women! Amazing, no? How they continue to amaze - destroying all stereotypes. 

International Women's Day was the next day. It came, it went and here I am, raising a toast to that "aaji" (grandmother), a role model as good (or better than) as any!

Sats