Stoodstill at a
Railway Crossing— % &A railway crossing (or phatak in Hindi) is where time stands still. The wait it demands of you is urgent. It isn't like that of an airport—there, you have two hours to lounge, sleep, read, hog, walk, chat, window shop, do a 5k or scroll endlessly on Instagram, until boarding.
On the other hand, a railway crossing hardly gives you time to take out your phone, to get down from your vehicle and stretch, or even to turn off the ignition. It offers a finality to your wait. You cannot escape it, you cannot honk your way through it, you cannot break through the barricade. The wait is a mandate. Like time, you have to stand still.— % &Railway crossings turn me into a kid. I hear the faraway whistle and my heart starts to thump. I can't wait to see the train come. The whistle gets louder, heavier. The engine approaches, its sharp yellow beam sets the rails on fire. The moment the engine passes, the count begins.
One, two, three ... seven, eight ... thirteen, fourteen. I don't stop until the X sign comes along with the red blinking light at the end of the nineteenth bogie only to inform me that it's gone. To me, it is like spotting nineteen pretty old cars one after the other.— % &Most corporate millennials, unless we hail from a place which doesn't have an airport, are more or less disconnected from trains. There are flights to almost everywhere we wish to go now. In the metropolis, the grotesque underpasses and the majestic flyovers steal away the leftover view of the tracks we could have had. To stop us dead in the tracks, in awe and in remembrance, of a medium of travel that has carried the world around for centuries.
Travel writer Paul Theroux wrote of trains as a residence. And it is only ironical to not think of this moving residence from the day a big city turns into our residence. Only the masses travel by trains now. Most of us prefer taking our own cars for short distances, and flights for the longer ones. How do we even think of trains if we don't see them often?— % &The answer is in the railway crossings. A railway crossing is a living breathing urban museum to take your kids to, before another development project constructs a flyover over it, with a No Stopping signage.
A railway crossing is an endangered urban relic, a heritage site, a rite of passage. It is a place to visit and to experience.— % &I am oddly in love with railway crossings. It brings to the fore something that urbanisation has erased from the public imagination. Trains. And with trains, come the dazzling speed that carries along a blur of countless faces and flashes of white light, the rusty smell of metal and dust and sweat and urine, the clatter of the rails and the chatter within. A train to me is no less than the entire country packed and shipped off in a compartment. Cash on delivery. Standing at the railway crossing is no less than travelling India, one coach at a time.
When did you last do that?— % &-
Three Birding Words I Learnt
1. Endemic: species which are found in a particular region only. For example, Malabar Whistling Thrush is endemic to the Western Ghats (Malabar) region.
2. Lifers: First spotting of a particular species of a bird in one's life. Usage: I got two lifers tonight—a Sri Lankan Frogmouth and an Indian Scops Owl.
3. Old World (species): The bird species that exist across all continents because they have existed for millions of years, before the continents existed and the whole world was one contiguous supercontinent called Pangea.-
I can't stay at someone's place for more than a day because the host in me starts to find myself annoying to them.
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I wrote more than I read.
As I'd discovered I was a writer.
I read more than I wrote.
As I'd discovered I need to
read a lot more
to truly become a writer.-
The Bane of Consistency— % &I started my new year strong. This January, I worked out every single day—I either walked, cycled or played badminton each day. The result was a streak on my Strava calendar, each day filled with an orange circle and an icon designating the sport, sometimes a count of two or three inside those circles, denoting the count of activities recorded within a single day. It inspired me to be consistent, to not miss a day. Some days, I'd just walk a kilometer to log an activity.— % &This February, I continued with my streak and logged in an activity for first three days straight. On the fourth day, I met with an accident. While my knuckles had swollen and a deep gash on my chin had to be stitched, luckily, there was no injury to my legs. The very next day, I walked 3.5 kilometers and followed it up by another 5.5 kilometers the next day. The following day, I just vegetated at home. My jaw hurt, my right hand was still swollen. At night, I decided to go see a friend and upon realising, I didn't walk or record an activity, I cheated. I slyly and sheepishly recorded a fake workout. I turned on the outdoor cycling workout mode on my watch and drove my motorbike for six kilometers. After all, I couldn't afford to kill my streak! It would look bad on me.— % &The workout added one more orange circle to my unbroken Strava streak and it showed me cycling at a whopping 29 kmph for the distance, a speed honestly not possible given my condition—I still can't close my right fist properly to hold the handlebars. Moreover, the elevation, speed-breakers, the pothole-ridden patches, and the worst of all, the traffic would have reduced my speed to a maximum of 20kmph even if I were well. Embarrassingly enough, Strava showed it was a new personal best, a frigging speed record on that route! I had never cycled this fast before.— % &The next day, I went for Cubbon Reads and while I did walk some good 4-5 kilometers through the day, it was not a concentrated effort so I didn't record. When I chose to drive over to another friend's in the evening, I was tempted to game my streak again. Another fake cycling to fill in for my lethargy. But somehow, this time I didn't feel like. It was not morality that prevented me from faking it. My moral compass is quite loose, frankly (blame it on being a writer—every morally corrupt thing I do is an interesting turning point in an otherwise boring story of my life, giving me a story to tell, like now). I didn't feel like recording anything for the simple reason—the distance of 1km was too little to cycle. I felt it didn't suit a cyclist of my calibre, ha! My Strava streak was broken yesterday, after a good 40 days run since the new year. And you know what... — % &I feel so f***ing liberated! Now I don't have to workout for the sake of a streak, but for the joy of it. I haven't yet worked out today and I don't know if I will yet. But I do wish to go watch water birds in a nearby park in the evening if I'm free. A long walk might happen, but for an altogether different and truer reason. Not for my 2024 everyday workout resolve, now broken. Sadly, this is what New Year resolutions do. They clamp us down on a routine and slowly starts suckling joy out of the thing we do, often not providing us a window to exercise our free will. That's what having a checklist for books does too. — % &It's funny what being an amateur enthusiast can do to us at times. To get into a routine, into a good habit, we lose the call of our body, of our mind. As a seasoned reader, I advocate every reading enthusiast to not read for some checklist but for pleasure, but look what I did! I ended up doing the same with fitness, even faking it. Thanks to the conscious missing of that orange circle from my consistency streak, I would now get to walk when I want to, how much I want to. Now, my Strava feed won't be filled with hurried 1ks and 2ks on terrace before midnight just to log a workout, but a longer 3k or 5k done because I want to walk. For birds, or for words. — % &
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A good friend is one who knows how to share your sorrows in private, and happiness in public.
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What deters most of us from forging new deep friendships in our thirties is people. We fear encountering people who give up too soon when shit hits the fan, whose everyday problems hijacks their and their friends' life. The only people who are tolerable in this regard are the ones that are detached and kind. They expect less from you and are emotionally self-reliant.
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