Limp-jogging around the campus
It must have been over two decades ago since I last got hurt playing a game or two. All injuries then, were sported proudly like a badge of honour earned in a battlefield as if. The walk used to gain a war veteran’s sway and even flamboyance. To play when injured would be considered heroic with one’s attitude laced with new found aggression, as if drugged with a new recipe of adrenalin only available to higher mortals.
But since, I have watched my waistline slowly grow – without any alarm whatsoever. The self-label since recent years “am old-fat and ugly” is in the process of becoming “older, fatter and uglier”. I also seem to have fallen in love with the little belly bulge calling it my ‘asset’ 😉 In any case, the multi-packs these silver screen heroes display are obnoxious for my single pack is bigger than the accumulative mass of their 6 or 8 packs. Occasionally, I have begun to draw comfort by comparing my bulge with elders like Bhai Balbir Singh although meeting his eldest son, Bhai Bahadur Singh, was comforting for he also seemed at least double my size.
Well, perhaps it is this wonderful environment in the Guru Nanak Dev University campus that lured me to wear a t-shirt again and go out jogging. I must have become old now for even the presence of countless young ‘ladies’ in the campus failed to bring any sparkle in my jog-stride. Not one of the young ‘men’ noticed me jogging albeit slower than the slowest people walking. The badminton court was luring though and yesterday I had a session – a lot of shuttle-knocking around with an assist-professor who really plays well and then had two games with two different people, one lost – one won. I slipped twice while playing and woke up in the morning with frozen knees. Nobody took my limp as a veteran’s sway – a badge of honour. Just old age catching up they thought.
The Anād Foundation 
Baldeepji, this is really funny!
Hehe! Must be my Angrejji I guess 😉
Why were you perving on these “young ladies”?
Sharam kar, dhara tera chitta ho rehya ta tu jananiyan wal bherri akkh naal dekhi jaanda.
For someone who is claiming to be the heir to the Gurus tradition of Sangeet, your lusty behaviour is deplorable!
this post is a delightful reflection on experience and aging. i think that as we live through life’s experiences, our body becomes the first location of change that we can actually physically see transforming into something that it wasn’t before. along the way, the ‘injuries’ we endure, both literally and figuratively, are what add layers of complexities to our being. these ‘injuries’ give us much needed new perspectives on life. it’s great that you are continuing your journey with reflections as such. yours is a sophisticated sense of humor that infuses irony and powerful imagery into your writing, resulting in a profound impact on the reader.
This Manleen person just killed it with the analysis. He/she seems pretty smart. Deepa it’s your mind that needs to get out of the gutter.
Bhai Sahib, don’t worry about the nay-sayers. We can talk about the world we envision and bring forth the future or we can muck around in the mud with short-sighted people and bring forth more mud. When I was a child I learned from Mary Poppins that when you point your finger at someone else you have 3 pointing back at you. I have never forgotten it and from my personal experience with my own pointing as well as the pointing I have witnessed from others, Mary Poppins got it right. What I see in the other is a reflection of something inside myself. (This is also true for the good stuff I see in other people too.) I can’t change what I don’t like in them, but I can do something within me. Ego’s are ego’s and we all have them, with the 5 friends cheering them on. But we don’t have to listen to them and we can sing a different song. Like a lotus floating on the filthy water……