On your bike mate!

It all started in the doctor’s clinic. She looked grimly at my reports, murmured something that sounded like "oh dear, oh dear" under her breath and then pointed at my belly and suggested "we really need to do something about that". There it was again, that "we" thing. For some reason she made it sound like she was in as bad shape as I was. She would never say "you". It's always "we”, “we need to get a test done", "we need to increase the helpings of salad", "we need to be regular with our check-ups". Anyway it was clear that my regimen of morning walks was not doing me much good. Listening to the latest podcast of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.. or Mark Kermode’s movie rants while doing five laps of the Orchid Garden complex was not sufficient compensation for ‘our substantial calorific intake’ the doctor gently pointed.

My options were to shell out a fortune and once again join some fancy gym and then doing calculations that told me that everyday I didn’t go I wasted another 500 bucks, or do something I was likely to enjoy - like cycling. All the research suggested that if you managed to not get run over, or not crack your skull in a fall, it was the best form of exercise. This sounded reasonable and so I decided to buy a bike.

It was a difficult process. My mind said buy a road bike for short gentle rides, my ego said buy a mountain bike do something adventurous. The bike gurus on various web sites suggested a 19.5 inch frame would fit my size, I just liked the feeling of a slightly smaller 18 inch one. The shopkeeper said I should go for the new orange coloured frames, I thought I'd look a right Charlie on anything that looked like a kids cycle.  So after much deliberation and research I was won over by the selling skills of one Mr Lance Armstrong who swears by Trek cycles.

I also explain this impluse as somewhat a response to mid-life crisis for the sedate. If had been a little more on edgy I'm sure I would have conviced myself to buy an Enfield Bullet and if I had the money I may have gone for the little red Porsche convertible. 

Anyway it's been about a week since I got the bike and not one fall and a fair amount of fun. Stay tuned for more about the rides themselves...

Being Regular

I truly admire those people who blog regularly. It seems to be compulsive for them and the most impressive part is that they actually have something to say everyday.

And then there are the others. The rest of us, those whose lives just don't seem as full and happening, those who really don't have anything interesting to write about. I mean look at my track record - two blogs about a 20th year school reunion and one about why I think people write blogs. So basically the reader of this blog can fairly surmise that they need not check back for another posting till about 2027 when we have our 40th class reunion.

But what I noticed is that people do not just write about events, but also about observations, no matter how small or insignificant. In fact some of the most interesting are often the most insignificant ones. You know the kind when you see something that makes you smile inside but you think it's not worth sharing because it's really not much. An example may help.

I stopped at a dusty crossing on a country road outside Agra to ask directions for the bypass road to Gwalior. Both men point in the same direction and reassure me that I have to keep going absolutely straight. Then as we start to pull away the older one shouts out "Bilkul aankh meech ke" which sort of means shut your eyes but also suggests something like with blinkers on. What a lovely expression. It did make me smile all the way to Gwalior and at every intersection we came to I'd think "Bilkul sidha - aankh meech ke".

And so I have decided to put myself into observation mode which gives me a good excuse to look blankly at people and then smile.

Encouragment and Confessions

I have been flooded by emails from class mates in the last few weeks appreciating my recent blog postings on this alumni website and encouraging me to continue the writing. Well when I say ‘flooded’ it was actually just three. But this series of emails has had an interesting effect on me. I was struggling to put my finger on what it was evoking and then realised it was something called self worth and confidence. This feeling was somewhat unusual until I realised that these emails probably amount to the greatest appreciation I have ever received by a group (except for that one time in tenth or eleventh grade when I was one of the first to get chicken pox and went around spreading it among many of my fellow students who all thought that two weeks in the dispensary would be any day better than going to class). This does off course tell you a lot about my sad state of affairs, but enough of the self-pity.

The fallout of this sense of confidence was to start me thinking about how to continue the blogging and perhaps get more people to participate and re-connect. The more I thought about it the more I kept hearing this line in my head - “the road the hell is paved with good intentions”.

My initial thoughts were to start a series of questions that would lead to a series of what I call “historical confessions”. Like most secrecy acts that keep secrets locked away for a limited period, I thought it’s now more than 20 years since people have left school and have entered a completely new stage of life. Surely we could get people to start opening up about some of the things they were not comfortable talking about at, or right after school.

Questions included:
- Whatever ever happened to that girlfriend/boyfriend who you thought you would spend the rest of your life with and how would you introduce them to your current spouse/partner?
- If you left school before graduation can you please tell the rest of us the real reason for this?- What really was the worst school regulation that you broke and if you have children how would you react to them doing the same?
- Did we have, or can we make up a retrospective class list of “person most likely to succeed/become a leader/fail/be famous/be infamous/become an ascetic/be a millionaire etc." and then actually see what those people are up to now?
- Any other secrets or confessions that someone wants to make after 20 years and their perspective on it now that we are a different generation.

Of course I realised it looked a bit like an Oprah Winfrey script, but also that at best there would be that awkward pin-drop silence on the website while people wondered who is going to go first, or at worst I could be excommunicated from the alumni list by “she who must be obeyed” (the name that Merryn has appropriately given to our beloved class shepherd - Lorrie).

So to keep good intentions in control, how about this why not also post a short blog on the latest person you met from our class and on how you think they have really changed since leaving Woodstock.

Also let me clarify that anyone who wants to respond to the other topics I suggested above is free to do so, but completely at their own risk (if that’s OK with you Lorrie?). And lastly I promise not to consider any posting in response to this as fan mail, and if you hear a loud “pop”, it’s probably just a self-confident bubble.

20th Reunion Preparations

Someone from the class of 86 got my number from the extremely well managed Woodstock School alumni website and called me the other day. In the course of the conversation he said he had seen my photo on the website and commented that I looked very different from how he remembered me at school. “Really!??” I said.

Anyway the point is that I am quite terrified about the upcoming reunion and have been contemplating desperate measures in preparation for the day. A diet may do me some good but I probably need something closer to major surgery including facelift/s, hair transplant, and liposuction. Some of you may remember that at school I was given the nickname “Boss”. A kind classmate once told me that it was because I resembled a certain villain from the “Dukes of Hazard”, and something tells me that the name may just stick (another acronym was less charitable, but I won’t go into that here).

The other recurring nightmare is the one when I remember myself in school, walking around the quad and seeing some middle aged person from say the class of ‘67 clicking photos and trying to have a conversation with a student, and the thoughts that went through my mind. I think it went something like this: “My goodness, don’t these people have a life. I mean imagine having graduated before I WAS EVEN BORN and then coming all the way just to see if things have changed! Well actually Mr so and so we got some form of electricity, and running water quite some time ago. And would you please stop talking about the ‘good old days’. Good grief”.

I have booked my tickets so I will be there for the reunion, but if I look somewhat different, or stay very very quiet – you’ll know why.

Exposing Myself to Strangers

"I think that's a very odd thing to do" said my wife as I began to type my first blog. I realized it is a very uncomfortable feeling of exposing yourself or being seen and read by potentially anyone in the worldwide web. The scary part is that it can come to no good whatsoever. Those who don't know you (the majority) will form an opinion of a person based on a photo and some poor introspective writing, and those who do know you will think "what the hell is he doing now"!

Anyways I'm not clear why anyone would write a blog except maybe to try and broadcast an opinion, stay connected, or make themselves better known, or enjoy the public "exposure". I find none of these reasons for my blog, I think it may just be time pass and the enjoyment of writing with no purpose at all. If someone is reading this I would strongly encourage you to stop at this point because this is not going anywhere at all. It's just downloading garbage through the exercise of writing. Just consider this as typing practice.

My wife continues to give me strange looks as I type this and has encouraged me to change the photo of myself to one of a pet dog or favourite bird. She says that I could then behave like a kid who sneaks around the garden, throws a stone into the neighbor's house and peeps through the bushes to see if anyone has noticed. I'm really just doing this to see what happens next.

Curiosity without the guts to face the consequences. But look, I have put my photo on the blog. How much more courageous can a guy get, especially one looking like this. But the question is, is this really me? And even if it is, is it really me?