Covid, Biking, and more …..!!
After a long ordeal battling with the pandemic, I stepped out of my society premises, and behold I saw this ….
It had easily been at least 7 years since I had ridden on one of these…and in a flash, all my nostalgic memories came crashing down in front of my eyes.
It is a common stream of memories that the 90’s grown-ups seem to have …..We r damn lucky to have such beautiful memories etched onto us, riding the bicycle as if we are on a sports bike.
For many of us, the cycle was the first big possession that we got in our formative years. The sense of euphoria, an entitlement that one experienced the moment we got our hands on the handle. I still remember, at that time Boys used to ride HERO ( No paid advert here ….xd) and girls used to go for LADYBIRD, and any mismatch in this combination was bound to be ridiculed.
Cut to 2021, Covid-19 had ravaged our lives, and then one day life sympathizes and gives you a chance to get some nostalgia masala into the cocktail of life — Jaa Sagnik Jaa jee le thoda.
I hopped on ( Only after asking the little kid..couldn’t risk being called a thief in the society), started riding and surprisingly enough I started off pretty good and at a reasonable pace. All came to me in an instant, and that got me thinking — what if one could memorize things once and not forget them……Toppers would be really pissed off at such a proposition …. TBH, I forget in gigantic proportions, guess those almonds & walnuts didn’t really help me there so kindly pardon my raw emotions.
Halfway through my ride, the inquisitive engine in me started revving and got me asking as to why do we tend to forget our formulas in maths and Science ( Read Engineering Grad) — so necessary for us so as to not get beaten up by our dads ( Pun intended ) ……But all the side stuff and enjoyable stuff remains put.
Rummaging through the world wide web, I came across something called as types of memories, that our cerebrum ( Brain) consists of — Declarative and Procedural.
In Layman terms, all the necessary stuff to ace the exams are stored in our Declarative memories, but all the fun stuffs like — riding a bike, strumming a guitar, swimming, etc are stored in the procedural section. The procedural section seems to be our fun spot in our brains. Having said that, our muscles also have their own set of memories called muscle memory ( Sorry Brain, can’t really help it …it just not you who has memory )…okay coming back, once our muscles and our body learns to react to particular stimuli, that bit of information remains etched into some parts of muscle ( don’t know where…but definitely present somewhere ) ….researchers say so, and if they say it is there, then it is there, I really won’t bet against them.
Ok enough of Gyan, let's come back to enjoying the experience of riding because we are fun-loving corporate people ( Read oxymoron ). Riding and imagining myself with hair flowing in the wind — for all those nit-picking people who might ask if I am bald or what … I shaved off my head during the lockdown, because why not, it is good for hair growth ..(mom says so). I rode that boy’s (remember ..that boy ), for good 30 mins, and then after giving up the cycle, I had quite the sheepish look on my face, because the boy apparently freaked out and called his mom and they were standing at the gate to greet me with disdain. After that embarrassing encounter, I felt nice ….not that I am shameless, but just the fact that I got a ride to the bike satiated my desire to be a child again.
I think we all have the child in us, buried somewhere beneath the layers of grown-up shit and the perennial “Log Kya Ka henge”.
Seriously after that I went to the swing porch and had a gala time, once almost kinda launched myself in the air, only to see the kid beside me staring at me in awe, but then I said to myself “Control Uday, Control “ ( ‘Welcome’ Fans !!!).
What the pandemic has essentially done is that it has slowed our pace of life to 0.75x, and that has enabled us to slow down a tad, and create moments of magic for ourselves and rediscover our child behavior that has laid the foundations of who we are — So take some time off, do what our inner self wants and for a moment forget the cute words by our bosses ( Couldn’t risk writing otherwise …you never know, my first reader might be my boss himself) that defined us over the years and trust me you won’t regret.
