Turbo time? I don't have a clue how to remove the white highlights. Time to migrate to wordpress, perhaps.

“The greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is nature’s payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses; people have become woolly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. ‘Good for you’. Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lady with few friends these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms, she rewards passionately.”
A beautiful paragraph, that. So true. And it made me feel so guilty for missing the training ride today. 
I have ridden through blinding heatwaves and crushing hailstorms. It's not the physical suffering that bothers me. In fact, whenever an auto putters by, or a truck rumbles past, I give them a 20 second head start, put my head down, get on the drops, clench my abs, force myself to take slow, deep breaths and shoot after them like a bat out of hell. Man against machine, meat against metal. Often they get away, sometimes they don't. A smouldering fire slowly seeps into my legs. It's a nagging, dull ache that demands to be felt. It can't be blocked. It hurts. It hurts a lot. But I love it. I'm an endorphin junkie through and through. 
What really bothers me is that I am required to share the road with a horde of multicoloured air-conditioned tin cans running on dinosaur juice, carrying obese woolly mice with alcohol oozing out of their ears (I exaggerate, but sometimes that is how it is.). I have seen Adi Kaul's scars. Didn't like the look of them. Heading out on the highway in the half-light of a cloud-covered, drizzly dawn is not the best of ideas.
 But I don't want to lose the power that took so much pain and sacrifice to build. Time to get a turbo, perhaps?

I copied the opening paragraph from The Rider by Tim Krabbe. It is often said every cyclist worth their salt should read it. Follow this link for a review of the book and some pithy excerpts from it.

I'm a prat.

"Eeeek saw keelomeeter!" (A hundred kilometres!)

  I struggle to find my poker face. 

"Haan ji." (Yes sir.)

"Thakte nahi ho?" (Don't you feel tired?)

Ufff... bhagabaaan...  I'm usually as good as new following a half-hour nap after the Sunday torture sessions, and I stopped feeling the 50 kilometres-in-one-and-a-half-hour rides several millennia ago, but I fail to muster the will to explain that at that moment.

"Nahi ji." (No sir.)

Don't say it! Don't you bloody say it!

"Pagal ho kya?" (Are you crazy?)

My poker face instantly hardens into the Mongol cold face.

"Haan ji." (If you say so.)

A memory from the BBCh ITT swims to the front of my mind.

Distance: 22.1 km, average speed: no idea, average cadence: 89 rpm, heart rate: 87% of max. HR

I shoot past the rider on the Scott Speedster, relishing the resistance the headwind offers. This has to be the twentieth rider I have crossed after I started.

"Come on, man, give me a fight!"

He scrabbles to get ahead of me, and fades.

I sigh.

 Distance: 22.9 km, average speed: still haven't got the foggiest idea, average cadence: 88 rpm, heart rate: 84% of max. HR

"Yaddayaddayadda-where-the-deuce-did-I-leave-my-God-Mode-at?"

I hover on the edge of death by boredom.

Distance: 23.9 km, average speed: I just don't care anymore, average cadence:  I just don't care anymore, heart rate: I just don't care anymore.

"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? SPEED UP!"

I almost jump out of my skin.

"You have got to be kidding me."

Warmth floods back into my legs as I zoom after Vinesh.

"Not fair!", he laughs. "Not drafting you!" I holler back as we both rev our engines.

Finish line.

"Awesome ride, man!" Vinesh yells at me. I clap him on the back. "Not nearly as awesome as yours!" 

We're buddies. Instantly.

It's amazing how "Brilliant ride!", "That's a beautiful bike!","That was well-written!", "What're you reading now?" get you rolling with people. It's even more amazing how these individuals invariably turn out to be absolute gems! :)
 It's a treat, watching people light up when they chatter away about things they're besotted with. It's a treat to have a flat stomach, to have your heart beat at 48 bpm, to rocket around Delhi for twelve hours a day, for one full week, without ever feeling any kind of fatigue, to be able to climb Yercaud at 45 degrees and live to tell the tale, to be able to lift yourself out of depression and get back to work when nothing seems to go your way. I'm a prat for riding my bike. Certainly. :)

A caveman's holiday: The plans

Wow! Someone +1'd that last post where I'd complained about people pretending I'm a lamppost! Do I have a regular follower? Cheers, mate!
There are roughly two weeks to go before my two-week holiday starts. I'm probably, definitely, absolutely, being selfish, but I don't want to visit my parents this time. Going home would mean endless forced visits to the homes of relatives, endless interrogations about how my PhD is going (Ohmigod!!!) and when I would land a job (Soon! Soon! Now give me an effing break!), and whoosh would go in a puff of smoke any chance I had of dumping all the misery I've accumulated here. Being introverted is such a pain! (I need a hug!)
What am I going to do, then? Well...

Week 1:
A. Avoid all human contact (I AM A LAMPPOST!).
B. Ride. A lot. Like a hundred kilometers each day. I'm not the strongest rider out there, but I'm tough. I think. Or maybe it's just the immortality of youth speaking. :P
 I have the routes charted out, with the bakeries marked with little pink hearts (kidding about the pink hearts.) and will be writing about them if all goes well.
C. Walk around Bangalore. I keep hearing about these prehistoric bookshops. It'd be great to visit them and be weird all by myself!
D. No science-shmience. I probably should have studied literature, or history, or engineering. Ah, crap!
E. Maybe sit quietly in a quiet corner of a cafe and read. The list's grown long with all these Bengali writers I've been reading lately.
F. Write. Maybe. If in the mood. Unlikely. Or likely? Dunno.

Week 2:
Ditto as week 1, only point B involves my portable gymnasium (read resistance tubes) and point C happens in New Delhi. Would I be writing about Delhi? Maybe. Maybe not. Nobody reads the rubbish I spew anyway!

Next on the list: Get cracking at those final thesis requirements! Maybe being treated like a lamppost won't smart so much after the holiday.

Don't read it. Loads of misery here.

I have a superpower. I excel at listening. But when my friend tried to chat me up on how what you read impacts how well you write, a couple of weeks ago, all that kept running through my head, to my abject horror, was "Maaf kar de bhai!! Mera dimag aur mat kha!"
One and a half years of headbanging over thesis work, combined with the departmental seminar and listening to the troubles of all those people, have elevated me to that level of misery where the mere sight of a human face has started to seem intolerable. It's AHMAZING! There are manuscripts in queue, but no will to write them; experiments are planned, but executing them seems too much trouble; there's no zeal to get out on the bike and train, no ardour to crunch weights in the gym, no will to read, none whatsoever to write, attempts to make new friends result in being treated like a lamppost, it's all perfect! Juuuust perfect. I feel exactly like that lawyer who goes to live in an ancient mansion in Munger and falls in love with a ghost. It doesn't end well. (Ref. Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay)
Heck I could use a holiday! 

Old flame (Contd.)

 I was facebook-stalking a certain lady (10/10 would do it again. A fellow bookworm is a gem of a find! :) ) when I came across a conversation debating the relative merits of the smells of old books and new ones. And BLAM! My authorly itch was set off again! I would tend to agree completely with that certain lady, having grown up among shelf upon shelf of dusty volumes myself. A book is not just the squiggles, more squiggles and even more of the black squiggles; the texture of the pages on your fingers, the musty aroma wafting into your nostrils, the warm weight of it- all add up to complete the experience.
But what do you do when the cupboard of your tiny hostel room threatens to overflow? Do you remain a stubborn purist, and pray for the damned souls roving the Stygian darkness of the electronic world? Or do you take a deep breath, loosen your muscles and take the plunge?
Well I took the plunge a couple of months ago. I found the water inviting; in fact so much so that it was only today that I realised that I have not ranted here in forever.
Amazon could not have chosen a better name for their product. My old flame has been Kindle-d into a roaring blaze in the last two months.  It is light, it is sleek, handles really well, and the use of electronic ink  and electronic paper tech in the display gives you the illusion of turning the pages of an actual, physical book! Too bad the 160 books in my pocket all smell the same!
end rant

P.S. Would love a critique if I do manage to work up the courage to share this on facebag. Aaand a book-chat and a reading-list suggestion would not be too bad, either.
There are plans to baby-talk about some of the science I have been trying to do as well.

Superpower

"Oh, he speaks, too??"

"You're very quiet. Is something wrong?"

"He's one arrogant smart-ass."

As a man who is naturally shy and withdrawn, I get that a lot. One of the banes of existing in a society of boisterous extroverts in our brave new world, I suppose. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. They say the truth. 

I write for fun, not really expecting any appreciation or praise. I know I have a long way to go, and there are people out there whose command of the English language is a gazillion times better than mine. But my heart does do some impressive cartwheels and pirouettes when I see one or two +1's on the list of posts on my humble blog. "Ah, at least one person liked what I wrote!" Your +1, my friend, makes my day. :)

I could write a lot better if I received some criticism and comments, though. So, um, feel free, maybe? I have the rarest of the rare superpowers. I listen.