I am fed up of fitness advice that people dish out for free

Hmm so I have been deliberating a lot on food and exercise of late. I have come to the conclusion that what was good for us as kids then is good for us as adults now. Waran, Bhat, poli Bhaji, can’t think of anyway that this food is gonna make you go to fat unless of course you eat a mountain full of it a la Bakasura or Chhota Bheem who keeps popping in Laddus like Churan.

If I am eating curds someone who is watching me eat says quickly “try buttermilk, buttermilk is good for health”. If I am eating Phulka then I am told to try whole grain Phulka (I thought what I ate since time immemorial was bloody whole grain aata, except aata didn’t have such a fancy name as whole grain. My mother went to the local kiranaa maal shop, bought about 5 kgs of wheat and then made a trip to the flour mill to grind it. Voila! Whole wheat aata is ready for you) If I am eating a piece of toast, I am told I should eat oats. I am eating ‘whole grain’ (mind you) aata phulka I am told to mix it with one part soya and one part oats to make it more wholesome and more healthy. If I am eating grapes, I am told to eat peaches and strawberries. If I am eating Upama, I am told to eat couscous. If I jog on the treadmill I am told to do pranayama, If I talking, I am told sleeping is better and when I am peeing, I am told shitting is way better. If I am scratching my nose, I am told scratching my bum will burn more calories. I mean this is ridiculous.

Too many people are thinking way too much about way too many things. I have no problem except that these people want to share their new-found knowledge with me and help make the world a better place. Oh I forgot about rice- If I eating my usual type of rice they say I should be eating brown rice.

Ok now that more or less completes the list of things I do and what I should be doing instead. The other day I was peeling a banana and my friend shrieked at me pointing at the banana. What? Banana makes you fat, didn’t you know? To make matters worse, I didn’t seem to appear too perturbed or emotionally shaken at the F word. I relished every bite. She told me that well what was done was done and I could do an hour of extra walking on the treadmill the next day.
Folks, listen to me. Go back to the diet of yore. Ok I don’t want to make you sound that old. Go back to the food that your mother cooked for you and go back to those portions as well. Go back to healthy living and eating, Go back to the times when you washed your hands and feet after you came home, go back to the times when you lit a naranjan (lamp) and said a shlok before you sat down to eat. Go back to the times when you said vadani Kavala before you put that first morsel in your mouth. Go back to the times when you scrounged around for Pohe, gul and milk (rice flakes, jiggery or palm sugar and milk) since there was nothing else to snack on.

Mother promise, you won’t put on a gram of fat. Of course did I mention stop going to the gym as well because you didn’t do that in those days? Liar, I didn’t say that at all. One of the best things of this age is that there is such a variety of fitness regimes to choose from- gym, tennis, yoga, kickboxing, dancing, Tai chi, Pilates, this tes and that tes but to offset the advantage you also have a gamut of food to choose and from at that too at any time of the day. Times were when tea and coffee were meant for morning and evening (or when you came back from work, to drink to perk you up a bit) and there was no such thing as ‘grabbing a bit’. You had a civilised lunch and dinner.
Times are a changing and while we are thinking too much about weight loss we are doing zero about it.

Nothing in life prepares you for death

My mother in law’s sister’s husband passed away on Monday and though it was no one close, strangely I felt as close to death as I have ever in my life. This despite the fact that I lost my father when I was 18 and have seen how it disrupts life (though briefly). We were back in college (me) school (my brother) and at work (my mother) on the third day after my dad passed away. Too much was happening too fast for us to be away for all those 13 days for indulgences in all rituals and customs and besides I have never been the one for observing them. A person has died, let him be and let me grieve in my own way (which is away from people and privately).

Looking back at our lives we did an amazingly good job. It is truly a
miracle that we survived on 1200 rupees that my mother earned in 1989. The absence of my dad did intrude once in a while but really, we were just busy getting on. My point is, you might have overcome the harshest challenges that life throws at you, you might have come out the darkest tunnels a survivor and yet nothing prepares you for death, that final separation, never to meet again the person you have spent your life with- spouse, parent, sibling, children and friend (have I missed anybody here?)
It is grief mixed with a complete dead-end kind of a feeling. What do I do now had I suffred a similar loss? Should I wake up? Have my tea, go to the gym, do my chores, work, surf the net, travel a bit? I have no idea. I am trying to be in the shoes of the person who lost her husband at the age of 83 and I am lost. I just cannot imagine.

All the books that I have read, films that I have watched or the conversations that I have had with my walking buddies and friends do not give me the slightest idea on how I would deal with this blow. Today’s post has no conclusion. It has no answers or suggestions. I guess it is for each one to find it for himself or herself. AND I am in no hurry either!

The cost of being fat

You have often wondered about the time it takes to shed all that excess weight. You wonder if 6 months from now or a year from now you will be your old svelte self and be able to move around that wedding without being conscious of your big backside. You must have wondered how long and how many more months you need to go through the rigmarole of that treadmill and dumb bells, how many more months of eating to a plan, how many months of pain and watchfulness before being fit and being the right weight becomes a way of life. Months, years, decades pass by without your goal in sight. In the meanwhile you swing between periods of fitness buzz where motivation levels are high and depression where even the thought of going to the gym is unbearable. Your children were little when you started putting on weight, you r children grew up and left the family home and you are still panting and sweating. You have only lost a couple of kilograms of that fat while life has passed you by (this is not necessarily a bad thing). Now your body has become a way a life; not the body or the fitness levels you wanted but the body that has become. You still wonder as you argue vigorously over all the technical issues of weight loss and good health and find yourself amazed at the amount of information you have and yet you have not been able to use it to your end.
While you have been wondering about the time you spend on panting and puffing and wiping away the sweat, your pockets are leaking quietly over the years, so quietly that you don’t even notice. Over a period of let’s say a decade, you have renewed you gym membership at least 8 times (let’s also assume for 12k a year) bought endless pair of shoes (for matters of calculation, let assume two pairs a year at 3k a pair) that you need a maybe 3 or four pairs that you want because they are so attractive. You have also along the way bought countless other accessories like an Mp3 player (again for purposes of the cost of being fat let’s assume the cost at 3.5k for a Sony Mp3). Now since we have considered a period of 10 years, we shall assume you have bought at least 3 Mp3 players. Other accessories include sweat bands, socks, gym towels, water bottles, exercises mats, gloves, caps, gym bag, exercise clothes, special foods that takes care of nutrition but doesn’t add to your already existing weight (all hogwash but what the hell, let’s try it). You have also invested in an exercise bike, a pair of dumb bells, ankle weights, skipping rope and stuff that is easy to do at home as well as exercising in the gym. Now catch your breath and calculate the amount of equipment and your hard-earned money that you have spent in the effort for weight loss. I won’t be surprised if you can’t stop catching your breath. The gym membership alone has cost you close to 1 lakh rupees. 1 lakh rupees at 9% rate of interest would have fetched you 9k per year and a total of 72k in 10 years. But let’s not get on that path at all. Let’s stick to money that you have spent so far in VAIN!
Feel like weeping, don’t you? Because you have not only totalled the costs but you also feel totalled. Cost + effort + time, add all this and you could have been a millionaire looking a million bucks, but you have spent like a millionaire and look none the better for it.
Gentlemen and ladies, its time to stop this charade. I give you 8 months, if you were really serious about shedding all that baggage and fitting in the air plane beautifully (where you just slide in and not wriggle until all your layers are in)then you will do it. Don’t spend on memberships (oh alright maybe for 1 year, but that’s it) get the right pair of shoes and don’t bother with the rest of the paraphernalia (it doesn’t help you lose weight only makes you feel like it) and start walking. Get that lazy (I say lazy because you can’t be bothered with your diet and exercise seriously enough to stop yo-yoing) @$$ and start pounding the walkway, sidewalk, treadmill and show me that yes you can lose it!

Legalise bribes? Mad-o-wot!

Legalise bribe as speed money, so said Mr Adi Godrej Chairman of Godrej Industries.Bribe is no longer bribe, it is ‘speed money’, prostitution is selling ‘emotional comfort’ via a commercial transaction, rape is not rape, it is called bleeding the society of weak creatures who are unable to defend themselves by stronger ones who are able to impose their will. Traffic accidents are not accidents caused due to negligence or oversight of laws, it is merely that the machine has a mind of its own and wills the owner to its ways. Wah! Euphemisms are lovely as long as they are literary, used in the printed word. They acquire a cruelty when you use them to subvert something that is obviously unacceptable. And when Mr. Adi Godrej of Godrej industries and Kaushik Basu, chief economic advisor to the Ministry of Finance make these suggestions at the opening session of the annual India Economic Summit of the World Economic Forum, my tongue refuses to move at their capability to be facetious. These are men who know their economics. How does it help to legalise bribes? If bribes were to be legalised, then I would still have to bribe the official to get my work done since I still haven’t paid him haven’t incentivised him enough to do my job that he was supposed to do in the first place in exchange for a salary. So on top of the official fee, official bribe money which is called speed money, I will still have to pay him something under the table that he does not have to issue a receipt for. I was surprised to read that N Narayanamurthy had made the same suggestion. I would very much like to dismiss these ideas as idiotic and an insult to the man on the street (the middle class who has to pay taxes and also bribes).
I would have loved it if these ‘captains of the industry’ has taken a non-compromising, stringent view of bribery that is anyways an integral part of any transaction that is out of the ordinary- house registration, name change in corporation, electricity and water supply meter, various permission one must get from the government. So legalising bribe would be just like heaping one more form of tax on us ordinary folks. This idea is not revolutionary if that is what the Big Guys were aiming for. It is not way a game changer if that is what the Big Guys thought. It is downright silly like a kindergarten child make an outrageous request only to have it turned down in an understanding manner because the child in Kindergarten! But Mr Godrej, Mr. Basu and Mr N Narayanamurthy are no KG kids (it’s a different issue that they might feel they are in Kindergarten and they can do as they feel because they have done their life’s work and it is now time to play, yay!). You idiots, you have to fight bribery not legalise it. You have to fight prostitution and not legalise it thereby sentencing thousands of helpless women to hell.
We need to diss these ideas right away and not give them even an inch for them to take root.
This idea came up in the India Economic Forum where all the ‘important’ people whose last names have synonymous with enormous wealth and power have exhorted the government to end policy paralysis. It couldn’t have been more dichotomous.

I witnessed club culture at its most HIDEOUS today

.....at the Besant Nagar Tennis Club.
I reproduce here ad verbatim the conversation between me and the coach/ manager/ supervisor of the club.
Me: Excuse me, I want some information on coaching…
Man in cap: yes? Ok. Where do you live?
Me: How does it …….
MIC: Please come in, sit down..where do you live? Do you work?
Me: If I want to be a member here, do I have to tell you where I live?
MIC: Do you work?
Me: Yes..can I get coaching here?
MIC: yes, you can play with the markers for 40/ 45 minutes at 6.30 in the morning. They will feed you balls.
Me: Can I come at 8? I would like to see my children off to school…
MIC: Which school do they go to?
Me: They go at 7.45…(ignoring his question) so 8 is convenient for me.
MIC: The markers are uneducated, illiterate and nobody can tell them what to do. They are mannerless. They want to do other job so they want to go at 8. If you come at 8, they won’t listen to you because you are new. It’s good that you come at 6.30. Members here give them 50, 100 Rupees so that they do a good job.. They are habituated to this. I am also working here for 10 years and I am also suffering.
Me: So you need to bribe the markers to feed you balls?
MIC: Not like that but they also become enthusiastic when you give them money.
Me: I will have to give them something everyday???
MIC: See that boy? His father and I are friends. He is a rich man. So when he comes to the club, the markers will worship him and feed him balls while others are waiting for their turn.
MIC: See it’s up to you. You can start from the bottom, suffer and then come up. Or you can hire a coach. But he is expensive. I have also suffered. For 10 years.
Me: What you are telling me is not very encouraging…it is….(he interrupts me)
MIC: See I don’t want to cheat you or give you false promises (Did I agree to sleep with him in exchange for a house on ECR by the sea, I wondered!)
Me: I mean if you tell this to everybody who enquires about coaching, not many people will join will they?

In the end, I found all this so sickening that I left. Once again I cast an eye on the scene on the courts and decided that I don’t want to play where in a rich man’s club where arrogant little buggers wield rackets because their daddy leaks paper with pictures of Gandhiji. I don’t want to play in a club where the atmosphere reeks of privilege and where players strip off their T-shirts because oh its so hot and sweaty. I don’t want to play because the markers who are the lowest in hierarchy (not unlike the Khaki clad peons) call the shots here and who are too lazy to work unless they are given a monetary incentive. I do not want to play in a club which is nothing but a showcase for ugly attitudes (like T-shirt stripping or holding face under the mouth of a water bottle and then shaking the face under the flow of water). Fuck that and Fuck you Besant Nagar Tennis Club. I don’t judge so easily or harshly but this is my second experience with your club and has been consistent with the first one four years ago. I have no respect for exclusivity nor corridors of privilege and hierarchy when it is based solely on rich daddy and when rich daddy and his kid revel in it (the smile on the son’s face when the coach mentioned his father is a rich man was the one to see. It was a smile full of pride). I hate it, I will never support it and I will never be a part of it. I’d much rather prefer the Grand Slam Tennis Academy on ECR where the coach is quiet, earnest and unassuming. The markers do as they are told, they are encouraging, and never step out of bounds (by assuming a greater role than the coach or by engaging unnecessarily with the players). Go for it people. If you are residing anywhere on ECR and want a good game or coaching, head straight for GSTA. Talk to Coach Guruprasad at 9282160609. Hope you enjoy the game!

I think there is truth in 'Indians and pigs not allowed'

I went to Mahabalipuram yesterday and came away feeling sick. No, it was not water or something I ate or the blazing sun. It was the sights and sounds of Mahabalipuram that made me feel severely sick. Consider this- This city is the a treasure trove of caves, carvings, sculptures, temples that are at least 1300 years old and in cracking condition. If viewed aerially, it would look magnificent but alas my friends I was very much on ground and very much in of company of mortals, dirty mortals. I saw a group of people picnicking under the shade of the butterball and to my horror they were playing a game of ‘plastic bag racing’ wherein they would let loose a bag from the top and see whose bag floated to the bottom faster. Needless to say the bag contained the food of the picnicking assholes. Pickle, sambar, biscuits etc. The men were in baniyans, and the women were egging them on. Next to the butterball, a woman was selling cucumbers (open to sky and anything else like flies for instance). Her children had made themselves entirely at home on this site. One of them had a runny nose, so she wiped it with her bare hand, wiped it off on her saree and then touched the cucumbers to rearrange them to her satisfaction. Did I mention defecating dogs, pups, goats, touts, irritating hawkers of post cards, souvenirs and maps, they follow you from the minute you step in and leave you only when you growl at them or buy whatever it is that they are selling. It makes them only little better than beggars, unfortunately.
The next scene I saw was a cleaning lady doing her job diligently in the Varaha temple. To my horror she was sweeping the statues and the corner spaces they were located in with her harsh broom- the kind that is made of bamboo and used to clean terraces or open spaces. I had a heart attack. There is dignity and no awe surrounding this historical site that is amazingly intact in spite of 1300 years of braving the eroding elements of nature. There is no natural sense of wonder for these creations of the Pallava empire. There is no sense of drama and theatre only a persistent feeling of being nagged by the mundane and the pedestrian. Indians treat any open space as a picnic spot with a license to do as they feel and this spot of historic value was treated in the same manner. Next to each temple or cave I saw big blue boards telling me not to deface, not to photograph, not to indulge in any ‘rowdy’ activity etc but I could not spot any information boards telling me a story. On persistently looking for them, I found them shrouded in honeycomb like mesh that hid for most part what was written on them.
Did I not mention numerous plastic bags, plastic bottles that litter the stone receptacles like accumulated filth in the nook and cranny of the jewel?
I came away depressed. We Indians are ‘the mantally sick’. We have no sense of history, no sense of hygiene, no sense of cleanliness and certainly no sensibility that shies from public littering. And in this context the sleek BMW is no different that the state transport bus that regularly chucks, food bags, mucus, spit and vomit. Really we are to the litter born!

Hospital, library, hospital, library..ooops last petal in my hand and hospital on my breath.....

So hospital it is..........
I guess once in a while our leaders slash politicians needs to take decisions that have not been prompted by any fast or are not seen as reactive to public anger. These are decisions, call it governance decisions or decisions for the betterment of the society (incidentally also one of their core key performance areas) that they govern. Being an ordinary person who is more concerned about a. prices of vegetables, b. whether to cycle on the road, through the pipes lying on the road or in and out of the puddles (the size of a nice village well) on the road, I am quite unaware as to how our leaders decide what will improve our lives. In this instance, The Leader decided that maybe she needed to move some books and make space for tiny kids with broken arms, legs and runny nose so that they will be able to get nice, free treatment. So far so good. I say go for it. What do we need books for? It is just a useless hobby of the rich and the retired, something for their twiddling fingers to hold while the poor kids are suffering and dying of diseases and ailments that can be cured only in a hospital that is located in an erstwhile library. Did she consult a Vastu specialist or a Feng Shui consultant? For only they can come up with such apparently illogical but profoundly wise spatial selection that has all the cosmic richness and a healthy froth of spiritual nutrition. A university library can be located anywhere. It can be especially located @ 10 kms from the university. The cabinet felt it would be appropriate to locate the library with other educational related facilities regardless whether the user is close to it or not. Madam Chief Minister this is exactly like relocating multiplexes, malls, restaurants and public gardens to places with a climate that is far agreeable than Chennai, like say Shimla or Binsar or Nashik or Sikkim. It’s nice and cool here. So I think it’s ‘appropriate’ to locate places of pleasure in pleasurable environments where people need to travel a 100 hours by train to read a book or see a movie. Oh but the fun of it!
The nine storeyed Anna Centenary Library cost 172 crores (this is info I gleaned from the papers. Personally I do not have the capacity to count beyond 10 lakhs and now 5 crores as that is the prize money of the new KBC). Now again as an ordinary person with a pretty ordinary sense of logic (as opposed to death defying logical capabilities of our Leaders)I feel that the a hospital and library are at terrific odds as far as their designs are concerned. Is a library building interchangeable with a hospital? My answer to this question (rhetoric as it is) is that only during war time when anyways anything that works goes but does it mean our doctors operate upon patients without anaesthesia ? Has The Leader and Her Cabinet taken into consideration the costs that this will involve?
I have a better idea. If Our Leader is obsessed with home improvement, then why not have the super speciality hospital in the premises of the Central Leather Research Institute on the road opposite to IIT (I don’t know what it does, but it must be something pretty out of the ordinary ‘cause my ordinary sense cannot fathom it). I mean the CLRI is lush with greenery that I can only envy. The campus is huge and ideal for a hospital, it is clean and green and humming with innovative ideas that have fuelled the Leather Industry in India and ushered a revolution (I don’t know for sure, but it must be).
Idiots, thick heads, nincompoops, berbers, lungi-wearers (that is quite damaging), possessors of a thousand pairs of chappals! My capacity to abuse stops here!