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Photo: Bijoy Ghosh

Multi-use practice People no more walk only for good health

“For observing changes through the neighbourhoods, walking is the best option,” he says. Apart from keeping his body and mind through the paces for the day ahead, walking gives him a leisurely peek into changes wrought by the economic activity. “Of late, the contours have changed,” he says. “We have more malls and apartments. The place has become posh. The bustle starts early.”

Moreover, walking “gives us the rare pleasure of finding connections between past and present. There was that whole-in-the wall kind of dwelling and now we have a building with a beautiful garden,” he adds. The street lays itself bare layer by layer for the urban connoisseur. “You walk for perspective, not to speak of health,” says Rama Sastry, a 50-year-old bank employee.

The track becomes a compelling narrative of pulsing breaths, of struggles to make it in life, lives lived, shared and gone, nostalgia and deja vu. “In our college days, we used to play cricket in this ground,” he says, reminiscing the good old days: “Then it was to make it in life.” But, it feels good to think about it, to walk in the same ground, where you were having a raucous game with your friends long ago. The narrow streets leading to the ground have become,” he points out noting the new look, “thoroughfares.”

Pradeep K., 25, a biotech student, enjoys his walks. The boy with a walk that may be called wind sprint, soaks in the serene beauty of the billboards, the gargoyle of the old building, the shimmering marble façade of that snow-white building, the thatched huts, the smell of roadside vegetation, the pavement sleepers, the wall posters that shout, the sound of temple bells, the milkman, the paperboy, balcony roofs, the milkman, the newspaper boys, the barking of street dogs, words uttered under the breath, the giggles and guffaws, the light of an occasional vehicle and the road ahead.

Some walkers take habitual, familiar route, just for reassurance; some adventure types venture into newer streets. Jagdeesh K., 45 -- you feel like slapping a disproportionate assets case against him for carrying that amorphous bulk on him - prefers habitual route. “Though you go along the street everyday,” he says, “you get to discover a little nook, a sprout, a surprise.” The enervating mundanity turns into something sublime when he “smells the aroma of jasmines wafting from that garden, the night smells, the stillness.” Ratnakar, however, takes a new route every other day just to challenge himself. When it gets dark, and the sound of traffic recedes, the air is slightly vacuumed off the smell of dust and automobile exhaust, he sets out ‘to clear up his head.’ “I prefer lonely areas, just walking along, going with the flow of surroundings and feeling good,” he says. A brisk walk a day keeps a head-shrink away, far away, in fact. It lights up the circuits in the brain. The issues "bugging me", get resolved. He has "epiphanies" and "mighty creative leaps" that turn the complicated issues into simple walkovers.

Something is required of us to beat the unremarkable routine of everyday life: a song, a dance, a listen, or a walk in the woods.

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