Long strolls are my refuge from nationalism and terrorism, two sides of the same coin that threaten individual life, liberty and happiness
Four times a week, I go for a 105-minute walk. It’s a three-lap circuit of my green fragment of New Gurgaon that starts slowly. But once I get my rhythm, then I don’t want to stop. It refreshes the body and also spares the mind of the 24/7 assault of the world’s noise, be it about an Islamic State butchery in Afghanistan, lone-wolf terrorism in Europe, or the four-morning nationalist spectacle of Donald Trump. Also, a journalist can’t keep away from social media, the crystal distillation of all human hatred.
The walk is a refuge from cacophonous outrage. It’s just me along the edge of human habitation. Pic for representation/Thinkstock
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The walk is a refuge from nationalism and terrorism, two sides of the same coin that poses the modern threat to individual life, liberty and happiness; it’s a refuge from cacophonous outrage. It’s just me along the edge of human habitation, walking past a troop of monkeys, a herd of cattle, a sounder of pigs (with their litter), a pride of peacocks, and a pack of street-dogs barking at any or all of the above. As if the road was their Twitter timeline.
Mostly, I walk alone. When I arrived here in the 1990s, it was wild and undeveloped, and snakes used to enter living rooms while the area’s pioneers watched evening-time TV. Thankfully, my neighbourhood is still quiet and filled with trees, and the path I take borders the uninhabited and arid bush-land behind. It gives me time to reflect: sometimes on the unfinished work in my life, and sometimes in a manner that VS Naipaul did in 1987’s ‘The Enigma of Arrival’, walking through the English countryside as if he were in a Terence Malik film.
I don’t know most of those who moved in after me, mainly because of a six-plus year absence to live in Chennai and Mumbai. Only a few neighbours do I recognize: we ruefully smile at the way we each have become a measure of the unrelenting passage of time. I haven’t made many new acquaintances during the walks though the faces are now familiar. Perhaps it’s because many are women who, despite their trendy workout attire and sneakers, are conservative when it comes to conversation. Or perhaps it’s me: I keep thinking they’re all auntyjis, forgetting that though in my mind I’m still a decade behind, my body has made me an auntyji’s uncleji.
Then there’s the ‘politikos’. Recently, a gentleman and his teenaged son who were getting down from their SUV suddenly said hello, so I stopped to chat. He admired my purposeful walk most evenings, and also said that I looked intellectual. That was nice, even if many in the middle-class think “intellectual” is a dirty word. I took his number and texted him the link to my latest mid-day column. I never heard from him again.
Another gentleman the other day caught up with me and asked how to lose weight. Stop drinking buffalo milk at night before going to bed, I told him. (He sleeps at 9:30 pm and wakes at 4:30 am to prepare for his transport business). People find it difficult to drop ingrained habits, particularly if they involve dairy products. And so, many such people don’t mind the recent proliferation of gau-rakshaks, encouraged by the Haryana government, so I keep my views to myself.
That’s not easy, considering how eager people are to talk politics once they find out you’re a journalist. One of my near neighbours, for instance, is in real estate and construction; he often walks along, asking me the latest and then answering his own questions himself, all the while praising the Prime Minister. I’m fond of the neighbour – he often inadvertently speaks simple truths – so I avoid any discussion that brings out the nuances and depth of politics.
The best part of walking is that occasionally my daughters accompany me. It is a precious time, for soon I will be faced with an empty nest. This is when I get to hear what is going on in their world, and it is often like glimpsing through a slightly ajar door into the bright light of another universe. Then, when I hear of their interactions in their world, I realize that while nature evolves, human nature is a constant.
By the time my walk is over, darkness covers the neighbourhood and it’s time for TV news to invade our homes and poison our minds. I often take my walks for granted, considering that whether it is the US or Kashmir, ordinary people walking the streets are likely to get shot at by the police; or by terrorrists, if you’re in Europe or in India’s neighbourhood. After this necessary cleansing of my mental palate, I’m ready for the messy, noisy world again, where everything is forever on the brink of catastrophe, and where a pack of street-dogs continuously bark at a sounder of swine.
Senior journalist Aditya Sinha is a contributor to the recently published anthology House Spirit: Drinking in India. He tweets @autumnshade. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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