Daily Exorcise - Part 1 (The HipHop Remix)

Hey hey hey. Forgotten me already have you? Thought I was gone for good? You are very, very wrong but then I won’t blame you. Its not your fault really. How were you to know that I have been terribly busy with things of a rather personal nature. Of course I will share it with you, no secrets between reader and author on this blog, but not right now. The time is not right. Patience I tell you. All in good time.

But what I CAN tell you is that I have joined a gym. A proper one with treadmills and exercycles and dumbbells and spindly things with weights and handles and steel and chrome and all. Yes I have joined a gym all over again.

Sigh.

Avid readers of this blog, yes all three of you, will know that Sidin Sunny Vadukut has always been most robust when it comes to matters of the waist. He has always enjoyed a good meal of tandoori chicken, rotis, dal makhani and custard followed by a soup and main course and has often been described, in friends circles, as 'cuddly', 'well-fed' and 'cute in a healthy sort of way'. If anyone looked at me and quipped that the pounds were gathering around me in little jiggly ripples of cheer I would merely, and coolly, shrug them off the first time and then roundhouse kick them in the face the second. (Well not as much roundhouse kick as smother them between my elbows. I can’t actually lift my leg that high.)

It was not a bad life really. With the right wardrobe of loose Fabindia kurtas and open-minded draw-string pants I was managing to maintain my self esteem nicely. (Yes there was that incident in that Air Deccan flight. But I ensure you I did not mean to get stuck like that and delay the onward sector by two hours.) Nothing to complain really. And yes pass me that Dal Makhani please. And a nan please. With BUTTER!

But of late, because of this personal thing I was referring to earlier, I had to wear a lot more of those stodgy inflexible formal pants. So off I went and bought myself a few pairs of regulation navy blue and dark brown formal pants that no self-respecting man’s wardrobe is complete without. (Unless you are Bappi Lahiri perhaps. But I doubt even he respects himself. Awwa awwa it seems!)

Then two weeks ago I suddenly noticed that something strange had happened to my pants. My feet went in alright and the shins and knees managed to enter without incident. Things began to get a little ‘testy’ higher up. By the time the fabric had been pulled up to my waist things were looking very very bad.

When I mean ‘tight’ I don’t mean hold your breath in and slip in the button’ tight. Oh ho ho no. I mean ‘scream in agony, get at least one hernia and pass out’ tight. I immediately did what a man had to do. Especially if he wanted to stay one. I ripped off the worsted wool, settled into a lungi and let out a sigh of relief among other things.

Except for one pair of jeans, which I could fit into by getting my roomies to hold the pair up open while I jumped feet first into the cavity from the dining table, the rest of my legwear lay crumpled around my bedroom laughing at me mockingly. Nothing irks like a deprecating length of corduroy.

(Enter hip-hop type loop here. Rap following lines...)

Things were getting out of hand.
And my waistband.
I was forced to understand.
No more room to expand.
No more the gourmand.
Between long term health and death unplanned...
this, mofo, was the final stand.

(End loop. Wait for women to get off you and applause to die. Continue.)

The very next day, after a pizza lunch, I ran to the gym next to my place here in Wadala. I stepped in with a heavy heart, a heavier wallet but with considerable determination.

If you are one of those people who like economics a lot you will note, in addition to the fact that you have very few friends, how several economic theories are based on human beings being
‘rational’. This means that they make logical decisions, are predictable and that he or she is a ratio or quotient of two integers, usually written as the vulgar fraction a/b, where b is not zero.

Well then, step into any gym, go stand next to the billing area and you will see why the above reasoning is absofreakinglutely wrong. A gym membership is to disposable income what a blackhole is to light, a Vadukut is to spicy fish curry and a Bush is to crude producing nations without democracy. These memberships grab impressionable young men and women in their evil sweaty tentacles and suck them dry till the victim is left with no personal wealth except small change and Sodexho passes in awkward denominations. (When this happens you can only either have Idlis or Murgh Mussallam and nothing in between. It sucks.)

Yet, in spite of the inevitable financial challenge, everyday thousands of young men weighing millions of kilos fork out hajjar for gym memberships. And they do this with rosy visions of high impact cardio programs, macho free weights routines, six-pack abs and, most importantly, for a decent shot at the hot dietician who comes in once a week.

But for a person like me, with the aerodynamic quality of a teakwood sofa-cum-bed, the gym, alas, is the last resort. I just had to regain the perfect posture and endless stamina that had abandoned me, after years of neglect, sometime in kindergarten.

So there I was. Melancholy yet intense. Sitting in a chair while I waited for the gym manager to initiate me into my gym routine. He was going to measure every measurable dimension of my body and then weigh me. After this I was supposed to get up, step over all the tiny pieces of my self-esteem that lay scattered across the floor, and go meet the dietician who would go over my readings and give me a review.

Her eyes ran over the tiny ballpoint pen measurements while I looked at the weighing scale sitting ominously in a corner smirking.

Is Sidin’s weight loss too big to solve? Will he ever be able to regain his self confidence and esteem? Will he ever be able to fit into his flat-fronted corduroys again? Will the dietician see the sensitive human being inside the cellulite? Is she single? Will Sidin ever write part two of a two-part blog?

All that much more in Daily Exorcise – Part 2… Coming soon…