Songs to sing, and stories to tell

Regular, daily runs are okay. I don’t push myself too hard. But participating in running events really takes a lot out of you. At times, there are actual tears flowing down my eyes. People cheer and smile at me in encouragement. This motivates me. What also drives me is the constant retinue of people overtaking me if I walk for a while. Let 100 people pass, and it takes the life out of me to overtake them again!

The euphoria of crossing the finishing line - the endorphins accompanied with the feeling of victory - there is no greater joy than that. Another feeling that I've had is the wish to do it again- Just after I finish the race, I have a thought which says that I could do it better and wants to do it better.

After my run, I share pics and results with my family & the girls & a few other people. The way the congratulations come flooding is overwhelming. So much love & well-wishing. I tell them that if I can do it, they can do it too, and they can do it better than me.

What I also love is looking back to see my journey - from 5km in 45 mins (with two breaks) to 5km in 35 mins (with one break), to running for 5km at a stretch.

The first graphic novel I ever saw was - “Hush” by Rajiv Eipe. Nilanjana was reading it in Pilani. From the name - “graphic novel”, I gathered that it would be like a cartoon series, only longer. Something like Tintin, or of the Superman/Spiderman comics category. I was looking forward to reading it once she finished with the book.

But when I borrowed the hardly-50 page novel, I didn’t like it at all. Back then I was much more innocent (a kid, really), and unaware of the complex realities of the world around us. It was all beautiful and rosy for me. I didn’t understand why someone would draw and write about such dark & unspeakable, adult things - depression, homosexuality, blood, power, abuse etc.

The sketches very vivid, and powerful. But the theme had me greatly dislike the book. Till a long time later, the memory of this book led me to not pick up a graphic novel.

Two years ago, though, I read “Persepolis”. It is Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in war-struck Iran. I really liked the characters & the story, the consistency of the drawings. I followed it up with “Kari” by Amruta Patil, and “Maus” by Art Spiegelman. The aversion of “graphic novels” has gone and I’m looking forward to reading many more such novels.

All throughout the day- at work and at home, we all sneak out time for the pleasures of social media. It provides us with entertainment, information, inspiration and updates, along with pretty pictures to look at. Over the years- many social media platforms have come up, had their own good share of popularity, and then degraded. Here I’m referring to all content-sharing platforms - facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, blogs, twitter, Quora etc. A few things that I dislike about social network behaviour (all limited to my opinions over my news feed &  interactions) are (and I myself am guilty of a few of these!):-

1. Exaggeration - Movies/restaurant/theatre, or other experiences in general, are either described as- “fucking insane”, or at the other extreme with - “I wish I could pull out my eyeballs when I saw/heard X”. I don’t understand this. I would like to save “mind blowing” for example for the feeling when I can teleport. For everything else, I’d rather use milder adjectives.

2. Our tendency to believe everything that is “written” or “published”. We often read about so-called surveys, researches and scientific findings- but what is the authenticity of these? Most of them don’t describe the experiments & studies in detail. Nor do they talk about the sample size. A study with a hundred or even a thousand data points can never give an accurate impression of human behaviour.

Just like while solving a crossword if you pen down an answer too soon, you proceed to solve all surrounding clues with respect to hints from that word. Similarly when you give too much importance to something early in your life, then you start building your life around it.

Getting back to #origami with this #lotus

I need to write oceans of letters, mountains of alphabets, long queues of words, to clear my heart out.

So many things that crept down as tears late at night.

So many things that came sweating out during the lakeside run.

So many things still unsaid.

Dhak Dhuk, from English Vinglish.