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CRANK'S CORNER

I run away from walking

K BALAKUMAR

        Walking is suddenly emerging to be the magic cure-all for all kinds of ailments. Everyone is recommending it to everyone else. The situation is such that you go to a doctor, and before you can even open your mouth and start explaining about your problem, he would have begun advising you to go regularly for walks, and at which point you will also be in a mood to accept the suggestion considering the fact that you came to him to complain about the poor garbage clearance in his clinic and the stink reeking from it.

        But seriously, walking is the newest fad to hit the city as more and more are hitting the streets with Reeboks, Adidas and even the humble holes-ridden canvas shoes in a hopeful chase of good health and plenty else. Everyone has an excuse for getting out for walking... BP, sugar, nagging wife, a beautiful neighbour who is already into walking a punctured tyre or a persistent money-lender (in which case, running is the preferred mode of exercise).

        Yet, after joining this burgeoning bandwagon for the last 10 days or so, I am compelled to report that walking, in this city, is very injurious to health - both physical and mental.

        The problem starts the moment you decide to step out of the house when the sun itself is just about shedding its early morning languor. No matter which area you are in, upon emerging from you home you will immediately wonder whether you have walked out into the peak hour-traffic on Anna Salai. For you have to jostle between the chaos of the milk vendors, the paper delivery boys, the returning-to-home call centre employees, the growling gang of neighbourhood dogs that are nature born to be extremely rowdyish at around dawn and the cab drivers who park their vehicles in such a fashion that the arrangement of the navagrahas in temples would in comparison seem straight and neat. In between, you may have to encounter the garbage clearance vehicle, that actually sounds as if there is a dinosaur hiding somewhere in its cavernous innards and smells like as if it was given birth in the depths of Cooum. The combination of all these is deadlier than the minefields you have to negotiate in the forests of Vavuniya if you happen to travel there.

        Unless you are nimble of feet and nifty of reflex, you may either have a mint-fresh newspaper hitting you spank in the face or may step on a morose dog looking to sharpen its teeth on readily available object, which in this case would be your bony ankle. If you indeed manage to sidestep these two obstacles, then most likely you will end up having an impromptu shower, courtesy the cab drivers who seem to practice holi with the dirty water they are left with after cleaning their vehicles. Like a primed pan-chewer who squirts out the juice upon any conceivable objects, these cabbies savagely spray out the water from the pail into any random direction, and Murphy's law has it that you should be there at that precise direction to drip in that dirty douse. It is perhaps a law that cab drivers have to be indisciplined even if they are not driving.

        But these problems pale in comparison when you compare them to the one you have contend with when dealing with your fellow walkers. One of them accosted me on the very first day, and asked without any preamble: 'Do you have sugar?' For a quick second I was about to ask him whether he was going to make tea or coffee. But looking at his insulin-shot forearms, I quickly realised that he was referring to diabetes in a generic sort of way. A few minutes of reluctant talk with him was like visiting a hospital as he kept harping on illnesses, their remedies and possible side-effects. But almost all of those regular morning walkers veer unerringly to the topic of health and ailments and generally you emerge out feeling all the symptoms of all the diseases that mankind has known so far.

        If you indeed escape the health fiends you will inevitably trip over the fitness freaks who, as if mandated by a rule, turn out in outfits that are usually associated with ramp walks and not with walks on roads. These men and women talk to you making eye contact only with your Nike sneaker or Fila overall. For them, you don't exist.

        Then there are the laugh therapy specialists you run into at parks where they congregate. Almost by a sadistic rule, every locality has one such group. Mind you, I have nothing against laughing, in fact I expect my readers to experience precisely this while reading this. But this laughter therapy is something else altogether. Just imagine a group of grown-up individuals, who otherwise seem sound in mind and body, gathering under a tree and laughing exaggeratedly at nothing seems pityingly an exercise in self parody.

        There are also yoga groups you encounter. Let me make it clear, and I don't want angry readers mailing me about the uniqueness of it, I am not against yoga. But when you confront individuals who contort themselves like a badly scribbled '8' so early in the morning', then it kind of unsettles the entire day.

        Add to this motley crowd, you have vada and bonda shops open at 6 a.m. and patrons eating their stuff at a time when you have difficulty getting in your morning dose of coffee in.

        After all this, I have only one option: Which is to run — away from walking, that is.