‘HE..LL..O’! The gruff voice hollered across the small park, though it was meant for an ear-borne bluetooth receiver of a cell phone tucked away somewhere in the shorts’ pocket. To me, walking just a few paces behind the man behind that booming baritone, it seemed as if a bolt of thunder had landed bang in the middle of my head. My stride faltered a bit, but I recovered, and for the next twenty minutes, (or ten laps), I kept pace, both with the anonymous walking companion and the high voltage conversation he was having with whoever it was at the other end. To be in earshot, sometimes at his back, sometimes ahead and often astride him, was rather easy; the topics and tone were the ones that posed a challenge of comprehension, for, everything under the sun, even though the sun itself had set by that time, came up for review, discussed feverishly and decisions and judgements delivered with such precision and panache that life’s myriad problems looked so easy to solve. Of course, initially I was struck by a pang of guilt at this mobile evesdropping, but all such morals soon melted away as the cascading waves of casual interest, curiosity and compulsive itch completely consumed me.
Welcome to the world of walkers; and what a wonderful one that is! Forget the prescriptions of your persistent personal physician. A daily thirty-minute trot is good for a variety of other reasons. If you are in an apartment complex or a cosy community, that is when you catch up with your neighbours, in both the literal and metaphorical sense. But it is a hugely rewarding ‘exercise’ even without the company; Rather I am inclined to think that those short sojourns give the best results when done in solitude. The solo walks helps you connect within as well as to the larger cosmos at peace and in your own pace and path. Walkers vary in their ways too; there are those early birds who want their quota of fresh ozone as it touches base to greet the morning dew. And there are the twilight trotters, like this writer … and probably also the one he overheard, for whom rising before or at sunrise is a ritual reserved only for Deepavali. There are the late night devils who are actually a nuisance to sleeping street dogs, needlessly prodding the latter with sticks ostensibily meant for self-defence. There are beach walkers, park stalkers and the roadside revellers. Over the years, I see an increasing number of women walkers…and youth too. Many a young man seem to walk into the middle age in a jiffy, reminiscent of the way the hero grows up in Tamil movies. I myself have been walking for years, but remain where I am, in many a sense. For the record, this club-on-the-move includes joggers and runners too.
Walking of course, has, er, walked with the times. Though the purposes remains the same, the paraphernalia has changed over the years. Veshti clad walkers have quietly switched to shorts with the sloppy slippers giving way to snappy sneakers. Grey eminences have seamlessly slipped into trendy T-shirts of all hues. Talk of ageing youthfully! But what has recently added much spice to the walking routine is technology. It’s quite some time since the walkman with the head phones made walking a happy experience though it also posed the hazard of rendering you deaf to the vehicle noises and sundry other sounds of the street. Many a walker has had his ‘perpendicularity reduced to horizantality’ and been laid flat by a speeding vehicle from behind. Some have even achieved moksha with music in their ears. In a park, it may not be that fatal but a devive could still be a dangerous diversion if the being who bangs into you from behind is yet to achieve his/her target weight loss.
The advent of the mobile with its rising utilities has now taken the walker several notches above the terra firma he routinely treads on. Gone are those studious walkers who knew every pothole, every dislodged paver and even the cracks and cervices in their wake. Today’s walkers walk with their heads held high with nary a knowledge of the ground ‘realities’ below. While listeners still abound, punching the air and nodding their heads to the rhythms wracking in their ears, talker-walkers are now a majority. My anonymous mate, bellowing his lungs out into the mobile phone in blissful ignorance of his surroundings, is actually the modern sterotype of a walker. You can espy them everywhere, that is, assuming you yourself are not occupied in the aforesaid manner. It is indeed fun watching men and women in motion, walking the talk, seeming like dictators addressing a huge, mute audience in animated tones and exaggerated gestures, but really emerging as just foot-loose loonies talking loudly to themselves, or worse, no one. But mobiles are not the only ones that convert your walk time into a talk time. Group walker-talkers are a pain, particularly when a hefty threesome walk abreast of each other, gossipping and plodding along, two feet apiece, on the six feet-wide stretch, making your walk less of a cake-walk and more of a tightrope catwalk. They can’t feel or hear you breathing down their necks, shuffling your feet in embarrassment and making all kinds of courteous but impatient noises, and in any case, how many ‘excuse mes’ can you deliver if you are on a twenty or so lap regime? Really, in such situations, it seems wise to chuck the cell and wear a blaring horn instead!
Such talk-walk is indeed a great nuisance to fellow walkers and also defeats the very purpose of walking. You are out of breath for totally different reasons and you lose the rare albeit daily opportunity to let the mind brood even as the body is brisk. There is therefore a crying need for a kind 123 agreement or climate type deal on walkers ethics and code. That said all that Talk, I mean, talk, has its advantages, particularly to a nosey scribe like me. The walker’s pathway is a veritable info highway. Like that boomer who unconsciously updated me on all affairs, personal, national and global, there is a surfeit of ‘breaking news’ stuff, doing the rounds literally or loitering the greenery or laid-back listlessly on the benches. Those venues are a barometer of public opinion as also a benchmark for your own private problems. From the latest grocery rates to cricket scores to the most recent bomb blast, politics, economics, child rearing, school timings, US ‘relations’, job ops, you name it, and the open spaces are a huge storehouse of free knowledge and unsolicited wisdom and an undrying source of information and inspiration. At the park I frequent, I often see writers like Jayakanthan gazing at nowhere in particular or Pushpa Thangadurai counting the pebbles at his feet. Nothing like the unhindered space between the sky and earth, with chatter around, to get the ink flowing.
There are a host of issues, garbage and pollution, to name some, that stalk a walker like a shadow. This space is inadequate to visit them all. I just took a casual walk in these columns from my rountine preachy rantings as a thanksgiving to a rite that helps me in my write path. It would be worth the effort if more of you cross your household threshold and hit the streets. And as you do, and if you are on the mobile, as you most likely will be, be wary of the gentle(?)man, sidling up silently beside you with his head cocked in your direction. It could me, over hearing! Or worse, it could be your wife’s father/brother!
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