A visit to the gym

One of the latest experiments that I have undertaken in life is going to the gym. I certainly don’t want any of those mighty muscles or the perfect man-body that a majority of the enthusiastic gym-goers want! All I want is to be able to continue to eat my ice-creams and sweets without having to change my wardrobe too often on account of an increasing waist-size. Of late, I have also been finding it very difficult to be able to hunt for Triple XL T-Shirts.

Starting off to the gym in itself is a very time-consuming process. I have to first go past the millions of reasons thrown up by the logical mind that resides on top of my completely inertial body, to skip the gym visit. Reasons can include existing or impending imaginary body aches, anticipated long overnight office work, over-due house chores given by my madam and such. Once the mind wades through these, there is the physical inertia itself that has to be won over. Bangalore traffic is just the last hurdle that the already under-motivated soul wants to surpass.

After chugging along in my vehicle at a snail’s pace, I come face to face with the walls of the esteemed sweat-shop. Having a café or a pastry vendor in the vicinity of a gym is one of the most miserable punishments that can be meted out to gym-visitors. Having the gym on the 2nd floor without a working lift just about manages to beat that.

As I enter the building, the high-decibel sound of loud English music can be heard well and clear. For a person like me who cannot typically differentiate between one fast English number and another, memories of Cacafonix from the Asterix comics series flash up. I yearn for a good fast dappaanguthu Tamil song or even a fast Bhangra number. But sorry – those are a strict 'No-No' in this modern machine godown.

A quick glance on entry shows the many different faces of the men and women around. . A gym is a very good example of a true melting pot. You have people from various cultures, economic backgrounds, occupations that visit it. Actually who am I kidding!? – you either have filthy rich people or jobless software folks who get a free pass from their company to enroll.

Of course the one diversity amongst the people is the size of their paunches. It can be as little as that of Hritik Roshan or as bulging as that of a local policeman after a nice dinner. In addition, the depth of sagging man breasts (phrase courtesy Chandler from Friends) is also a good indicator of the varied type of folks around.

A third category of diversity is what I call the amount of ‘pseud-ness’ that can be attributed to someone. On one end of this pseud-ness factor are the total fruits (like me) who just troop in silently and do some minimal cardio exercises for unimaginable satisfaction. On the other end are the highly sophisticated “dudes” (or show-offs) who consider their daily gym visit very close to a fun-filled excursion to “dream-land”. Words in Tamil that serve as alternatives for these dudes include bandha / filim parties.

These dudes have a burning rage inside them to show off their prowess to one and all in the gym. They can be very easily spotted though - one or more of the following features will identify them in a jiffy!

• Dudes have a hi-funda headphone set on their heads all the time. God alone knows whether they are secretly taking English lessons on those to impress the opposite sex with their firangi accent. Fruits only have the burden of the approaching drill on top of their heads.
• Dudes have a fancy bottle of water all to themselves, while fruits usually use those small disheveled paper cups next to the water dispenser
• Even if the device was not used before, dudes ask the helper folks to spray, rub and clean the device as if they were giving it a Kerala massage
• Dudes would be watching VH1 or Zee Studio or Wimbledon on Star Sports on their personal TV screens, while fruits typically favor regional channels or even Srilanka – Bangla cricket matches
• Dudes would usually hog the device for at least a 30 minute period at a stretch at the highest possible speed of performing the routine while fruits take a prolonged break after around 5 - 6 minutes of continuously slow activity.
• Last but not the least, compared to the silent fruits who avoid the instructors, the dudes make it a point to talk to all the gym instructors to prove that they literally own the place.

Of course, that is when the gym instructors are not busy talking to the handful of females who come to the gym. Females can broadly be classified into the above categories too. However, there is a third category here that does the highly musical soft-tone coochy-coo talking to the instructors for God knows why. Apparently, the number of pre-marriage last minute visitors amongst the fairer sex has dramatically increased, though it is still way off from such numbers for the male breed.

One thing I always notice in the gym – I typically run into someone that I know either from office or from a previous company or college… If they are regular visitors to the gym, questions on how long I have been visiting the gym pop up. To ensure that my morale is not affected, I typically give a highly elongated figure on the number of months I have been ‘slogging’ it out. Prior questions on when the other person visits the gym go a long way in helping me come up with a suitable answer. If they are regular evening visitors, I position myself as a recent convert to evening visits after over a year of morning visits. And vice-versa! If my paunch size is revealing the fact that I have not set foot on the gym for a long time, I take a deep paunch-hiding breath before I talk to them.

Once the talking is done, I start diverting my mind to the original purpose of my visit – some calorie burning sweat generating physical labor. A couple of lazy floor exercises act as fillers till someone vacates one of those fancy machines. These floor exercises have to be done very carefully, else you are most likely to encounter a nearby gadget with your stretched arm or some floor-exercise performer’s neck with your leg.

As I take my position on the treadmill, I think about the approaching painful endeavor of trying to cook up a sweat. Not often would anyone be as enthusiastic about producing sweat as they would be inside a gym. And ‘calorie’ here is the other magic word. The sweat is a great measure of your success at burning those targeted calories. You start wandering within the confines of the 2 ft X 4 ft. treadmill floor in the hope that the magic figure of 100 calories would be reached soon. After varying activities that include walking, jogging, crawling and standing still, over a time period that makes the HAHK movie look brief, I am completely excited to see the calorie figure inch its way towards 100.

The smile re-emerges. A feeling of having achieved something finally… That light at the end of the tunnel… In the moment of delight, I continue for a couple of more minutes and reach somewhere around 110 Cals. Wow! The apex of achievement!

At the pinnacle of my satisfaction, I turn to the next guy with a look of disdain on my face to see how many calories he has managed to burn. A casual look at that meter is all it takes – to come down from the fanciful pedestal of attainment to the abysmal depths of reality. When I see that calorie number close to 450, I start getting second thoughts on whether God was intending to be cruel to me today.

That is the moment when I become all philosophical and start thinking about the meaning of life and whether one needs to take oneself so seriously. As I grudgingly move my body down the two floors back to my vehicle, a fight between the good thoughts and the gym routine start playing up inside my head. A thought on the dinner awaiting me back home is the only redeeming factor in the whole episode. After all, I do need to eat well to give strength to the body to visit the gym tomorrow…

And the story continues… Forever…

Remembering the fun posts from my IT Services days!

An article today in IBN talks about the raining money in IT, giving Infosys appraisals and bonuses as an example. Not so long ago (in fact just over 4 months!), I was working in the IT Services area myself! It reminded me of those good old days :) Its too late in the night, hence I am not going to write a blog post on it. I am just using this opportunity to link out to some of the best pieces (personal opinion!) of my blogs last year.

1. Some may consider it adult humour, others may think of it as an innocent conversation during a couple's first night...
2. India is doing very well in cricket nowadays. Not so long ago (remember World Cup 07!?), they were performing pathetically. An article wondering what if the Indian cricket team was part of the IT Services industry.
3. If you feel people around you are not giving you your due importance, what are the 10 gimmicks you can do to make yourself act important.
4. If you have been in the IT industry for sometime now, there is no way in the world you would have NOT gone onsite. Typical characteristics of an onsite return...
5. You interface with so many people from many different walks of life. What must these people be thinking on your sick practices and habits...

I actually quite like the last post and reminded of the different people I face in this industry, actually any industry. So maybe, I shall write a blog post dedicated to these folks sometime soon.

A typical South Indian dinner at the in-laws place

Sunday evenings are typically reserved for visits to the in-laws place. My entry is treated like that of a king entering his mansion. As soon as I come in, I suddenly experience a never-before felt cool breeze in the peak summer of Chennai, courtesy a couple of ACs which get switched on when I set foot out of my own house!

Soon after arrival, the madam goes into the kitchen to talk to her mom while I start a conversation with dad-in-law on various topics including but not limited to health, wealth, career etc. Discussions typically veer towards what is going on currently on the TV channel that is presently being watched.

After sometime, tiny sounds (generally heard as “kada-muda”) from my stomach act as alarm bells to the in-laws. These are sounds of the type that are heard from the stomach of a person implicitly starving for a long time in anticipation of a feast; sounds that happen after the feast are reserved for later. A cup filled with three gulab jamuns comes flying at me like a tracer-bullet (word copyright expert commentator Mr. Ravi Shastri)

Thoughts of the word “diet” that had so eagerly arrived on my mind a couple of days back slowly start dissolving in the sugar syrup that surrounds the three large-sized gulab jamuns. Any word of refusal immediately raises eyebrows and low decibel conversations between mom-in-law and my madam asking whether hubby has developed sugar trouble. To ward off any such thoughts, the jamuns are gulped down the throat at the pace they came at. Here, some amount of caution needs to be exercised. If the speed of gulping down is too fast, more jamuns fill up the cup in no time. If it is too slow, frequent voices from inside the kitchen to finish off the sweet-dish interrupt your TV viewing.

Once the sweet dish is over and done with, the TV viewing typically continues for around 3.5 to 4 minutes (basically for the next set of items to get heated inside the kitchen). Then, there is a call for dinner. As I slowly tread towards the dining room, a large table awaits me and the madam. In the center of the table are three dishes that stare at me gleefully with ‘high cholesterol’ written all over them – urulai (potato) roast, fried pappads, and vethakozhambu (tough to explain – in short, a south Indian spicier dish similar to sambhar)

Nice shiny stainless-steel plates, resembling those carrying unlimited extra-jumbo meals in Saravana Bhavan, are placed in front of me. An additional sweet-dish (typically rava kesari or halwa) is served in line with the “start-with-a-sweet-dish” sentiment. Then lands a big mass of white rice: measures such as removing the plate away and use of force to hold up extra servings of rice are outright rejected. Typically, half the plate is filled with rice before you can realize what is happening. The other half is reserved for the aforementioned side-dishes.

A spoon with an extra large capacity to hold the dripping nei (ghee) gently passes over my plate. Within half a second, the white mass of rice is nicely soaked in the same ghee. Then land litres of vetha-kozhambu, and tons of urulai roast and fried pappads.

My History class in school would have ended sooner than the rice in my plate. Mammoth efforts to eat the food seem to all go to waste as I witness a never-ending supply of items in my plate. Desperate measures such as loosening my pant-belt and talking while eating (to let the ingested food digest) seem to just be desperate gimmicks without any success.

When finally I do manage to just about finish the rice on my plate, more rice, first with rasam and then with the customary curd / butter-milk (thayir-saadam) follow in equal quantities with even more side-dishes that literally seem to pop out of hidden corners in the kitchen. My concealing tactics are greatly tested here as I try hiding unfinished portions of the food under half-eaten pappads and potato chips. In parallel, I am constantly reminded of the weight I have lost over the last few weeks (the weighing machine always has a different opinion here) and how I should eat a lot more.

Eventually, after what seems like a patient Dravid inning, it is time to get up and wash my hands. It is not a good practice to meander on at the eating spot without washing one’s hands. But when the food is fully present uptil your throat and your pant belt is not the way it is supposed to be, you really do not have a choice. The 3 meter distance to the wash basin seems like that last mile for the completely exhausted marathon runner.

As I put in that last ditch effort to get up, there lands a plate of freshly sliced banganapalli mangoes. At this point, I cannot even open my mouth to talk, leave alone voice any denial. As the smooth and silky mango slices slowly but surely find their way through the food maze into my stomach, I more or less start thinking on when I am going to regain my capacity to talk and walk!

After the finger-bowl style washing process, I manage to get up, go and sit in front of the TV. As I try to muster up a smile and a nod of the head in response to every question, one can hear appreciation on how the son-in-law is such a nice silent guy. I very silently thank the food that is sitting right till my throat for the gentle remark.

According to our traditional Tamil culture, a glass of milk is essential to round off the day* (see footnote for explanation). At this point, you have totally lost all control of what gets into your system. The milk manages to find its way through the mouth of a half-conscious me. I have already started thinking on whether I would fit into my car door on the way back home and whether the car will be able to take the extra load. After the customary good night and the promise to come same time next week for an even better dinner with more items (like they do usually for next-week show announcements on TV), I walk in a trance towards my car, guided by the madam.

As soon as I get into the car with the madam, thoughts about the impending diet for the coming week to compensate for this food start afresh in my mind…

* - No references of any kind whatsoever exist

Oh Dear God (Kamal)

Thank you for being born in this world as an actor. You are one of the world’s best acting universities. To stop kindergarten children from writing big essays about your worth in your latest movie, I suggest you implement the following 5 commandments in your movies going forward.

• Please do not do complex subjects based on stuff such as chaos theory, butterfly effect, existence of God, weapons of mass destruction, etc. Most of our audience may not understand such stuff, and the movie ends before the average film-goer realizes the various nuances and how you have tied all loose ends up.
• Don’t bother to do your roles to such perfection. The problem that arises out of it is that people think that it is 10 different people who are doing these roles, and then, the film becomes bland. In an era where people can’t make double roles look different from each other, doing it 10 roles with such precision to detail may make people think it cannot be the same person.
• Subtle humor it seems is not the order of the day. If you keep doing Panchatantiram and Sathi Leelavathi type of movies, people start expecting Crazy Mohan type dialogues even in Anbe Sivam maybe.
• Please use well-done songs (and a lot of them) in the most meaningless of places in the movie to help disrupt the flow of the movie. It seems that underplayed songs that merge with the story are not the order of the day.
• Do not use computer graphics in your movies – people will start comparing you to Hollywood graphics. They don’t understand that such movies are made with budgets ranging typically in the Rs. 200 Crores range. They won’t compare you with other Tamil movies where nothing else in the same scale was ever done.

Last but not the least, on a serious note, I do hope that your next film will not see you in any make-up since the expressions on your face go for a toss with all the make-up involved.

All Rash Abuses

God, it was a really bad day for me.

I started the morning very late. Hence I could not even take a bath. Unshaven, I took the bus to office. It was crowded and hence I was sweating and smelling bad. I reached office and immediately caught a very bad cold. I was not able to breathe properly and started making puffing and panting sounds that one may consider irritating even if they were the ones contributing to them! The guy sitting in the next cubicle had a hard time, hence he was mumbling something to himself – I was already pretty irritated. I made faces at him and asked him to politely go and attend to other freaking duties. The effect of the missed bath had started spreading to my various areas and I had started itching bad. One hand on my nose, another hand on different parts of the body, a vaguely sounding voice and a twitching face - In utter desperation, I uttered to myself “Oh God! Please give me Than ki shakti, Man ki shakti to bear this pain”…

I returned home and slept thinking that the worst was over, until I came back to office the next day.

My company sued me on 6 counts of racism towards Andrew Symonds and I am now facing so many law suits…

When I go to office tomorrow, I fear they will pull my hair, remove my badge and sing farewell to me…