Skip to main content

My Jogging Days


As a child, it was the emptiness that I was fanatically obsessed with, and my jogging strip gave me just that. Far away from the city’s traffic, my jogging took me into the woods. Near the entrance we are greeted with a serene pond to one side that admittedly must have covered the strip itself when it was full. Sauntering around this lake are seen the local herdsmen; seated on a yellow rock, they watch by as their cattle walk in and out of the pond.

Far away from the entrance are the coconut and palm trees. The track snuggles its way through dried twigs and green shrubs; rocky crests and sandy troughs; narrow hesitation to a wide relapse towards the tall trees. With lungs heaving for oxygen, heart pounding, panting and with flesh wrapped around our skeletons that we wished to get rid of, we enter the zone of tall trees. A longing for the trees; too deep a feeling to comprehend.

As we leave behind us the tall trees and the mango fields to the left, the track now takes us into the village. Dense undergrowth to the right and yellow thatched roof huts to the left of the track. Before the huts are hens running helter-skelter; kids playing with marbles; dogs sleeping nonchalantly eyeing ever more curiously the new intruders. Patches of cow dung with palm imprints of the hands that slapped them against the walls; an old man with a wrinkled forehead and a bag of dry grass on his back; women working in the fields; the village atmosphere takes our mind off the heaving and panting, and we gradually relax.

We take rest at the end of the track. To one side is a Temple where the villagers come to worship, and to the other side are the trees that are reminiscent of thick forests. The farmlands beside the thick forest extend a long way into the horizon giving way to salt lakes and towards the end, city roads. It’s absolutely calm and soothing, but we return before the nocturnal beings step out of their homes.

As we jog back to the hostel, there is a sense of fulfilment and accomplishment. Our track takes us back into the woods. With the village behind us, we run into the woods. Although the perimeters of the woods have thick undergrowth, the insides are clear with little or no shrubs. Only the tall trees stand by lonely, all by themselves as we leave them behind until the next day evening. With sun lazing down and the swords of light after a day long of reckoning, tired and red, stroke our faces; cool evening breeze dries us up; the sand beneath our shoes rattles and the paddy fields sway in the breeze.

The woods are lovely, they make us feel at once lonely; but before the melancholic tendrils grip us, the woods bury us under sheets of delight and we return amazed at the wonderful life that surrounds us.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Photograph

I was born at about 8 PM on April the fourth, in the pleasant summer of 1994; the night was calm and the four walls of my birth place imposed a thick blank darkness about me right from the birth. My mother’s umbilical cords wound around a thin cylinder; I was the 24th to be inseminated by the index finger of a nineteen year old pimpled primate. Before me, the others were put to sleep in sets of clearly delineated columns; around the cylinder, they all crooned about in good health. Our embryonic development was constrained between two rows of perforated umbilical cords. I distinctly remember, at the time of my birth, a great blinding flash of light pierced through me; it lasted for less than a second, but it was the most harrowing time I have had. You might be wondering why our mother ‘Kodak’ was so utterly circumspect; to understand this, I must, with your permission, take you down the path of evolution. In the olden days, a specialised primate ‘photographer’ peered through the well ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Scientific calculator and singar kumkum

Chapter 1 Renu was about eight years old when she was first introduced to the calculator. It was the summer holidays when she found it in the dusty corner of her bedroom cupboard. Her palms were so small at the time that she had to stretch them both to hold it. The calculator wore a pale white frame; time had erased all the numbers on the rubber buttons. She carried it to her father who nonchalantly nested it in the burrow of his left palm and punched on it methodically with his index finger. Just as a woodpecker pecking at a dead bark looks away in befuddlement, after flipping the calculator upside down, beating it against his palm, her father lifted his head to meet Renu’s eyes. He was about to tell her that it had lived its useful life. But her dark eyes had worn an expectant gaze, so he replaced the dead pencil cells with new ones and repeated the beating about. Ten minutes later, he drew the child closer, rested the calculator before her chin and pointed to the rectangular bloc...
Post a Comment
Read more

Entrenched Prejudices taking the form of Patriotism

What a great way to celebrate the Independence Day? I am bemused, apparently owing to the wide exposure of emotional experiences hitherto seemed innocuous. Delve a little deep into the acquaintance with idea "patriotism", one will invariably be granted with an uncalled inquisition, one gets to stare at a disconcerting vacuum. Why do we brand ourselves with nations that are a mere collection of geographically propelled, culturally augmented, self aggrandizing people? Answer is elusive to many for the reasons best known to them hitherto for their own good are turning skeptical now. Man whom the evolutionists assert shares a common ancestor with chimps and gibbons, naturally after parting his ways with his cousins (chimps, gibbons) choose to retain a comprehensive emotional, physiological and mental disposition. Man, if he ever chooses to embark on a space ship that supposedly travels back in time is bound to diminish his self esteem owing to his impromptu urge to track his ance...
Post a Comment
Read more