The Quiet Thinker

Sitting in the movie hall waiting on my friend. Everyone around me is so inexplicably loud. I hear the cacophony of boisterous chirpy housewives with their well maintained figures, straightened hair colored blond to resemble that of a foreigner. A feeble attempt to stand out in a country of billions.  I  notice their businessmen husbands in their low voices, shaking hands and side hugging each other so their paunches don’t bump. Kids running amuck with no sense of control, or discipline. A few older aunties passing by who judge the younger women and their clothes harshly but look at the wild offsprings lovingly. Mother Nature truly thrives.  I wonder what their lives are like when they go back home. Do they worry about weekday tiffins for their kids and weekend brunches with their babes or are they CEOs of the next upcoming unicorn about to disrupt Modi’s right hand man?

I feel like I am cheating on Nike, if I even browse the Adidas website. That's the amount of loyalty this brand inspires in me. And this is rare. Since I started running- one and off- in 2016, I havent worn any other shoes. Sometimes I wait endlessly for a better pair of shorts from Nike, rather than hop into the next store and buy something from Adidas. Somehow the brand represents sport to me. It speaks to me and what I hear is- we understand what you want. We know when you wear a zipped up sweatshirt and run, the zip bouncing up and down irks you, so we've created a pocket to tuck the zip in. We know your clothes need SPF because you only remember your sunscreen once you are out on the road, halfway through your run. We know how chafing ruins runs so we made shorts with the softest fabric that feels like cotton candy against your skin and flies in the wind, staying away from your body.  If you think of Nike as the Gods (or Goddesses) that they are, this book does not disappo...

  Is “good enough good enough?”  Just finished reading ‘the day I became a runner’ - an anthology of 10 lives of women athletes and their rise to stardom followed by an eventual (and sometimes crashing) decline into oblivion. I was hoping to find motivation in their stories, a reason to get out of bed in the mornings as I yawn and crawl towards my own running journey.  But sadness was a surprising by- product of this book.  In the stories I read, every athlete’s dream seemed to be to nab the lowest hanging fruit in front of them- the promise of a steady income offered by a government job. Some wished only to make it to the Olympics- winning aspirations were reserved for US, Europe and Russia they said. Interesting how dreams also have a glass ceiling.  Most of them came from rural India. Outcast as Dalits, I read some stories of young girls who would stand outside wedding venues or temples waiting for leftovers to be doled out so their family could have one dece...