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January 22, 2010

The Great Marathon Divide and Other Stray Thoughts

1. Mumbai’s class divide: This was never more apparent than when you looked at the people who came out of their houses to cheer us during last week’s marathon.

When running through the middle class area around Lilavati Hospital leading to the Bandra Sealink or along the northern part of Worli Seaface till where it meets Annie Besant Road, there was hardly anyone who had bothered to line up along the roads. However, all along the Seaface as we U-turned southwards, outside all the upmarket buildings along Peddar Road and Babulnath and along the residential parts of Marine Drive, the local residents were out in droves, cheering, egging us along, sometimes full families together, handing out water, biscuits and sweets.

And of all of them, the Peddar road residents rocked! They were the most enthusiastic this year as last year and it felt really good to hear their encouraging shouts and words, especially during the difficult uphill inclines.

I do not want to speculate on the reasons why different localities behave differently, but it seems to have to do with the class of the locality, whether middle or upper and rich. Perhaps our sociologists and psychologists can shed more light on this!

2. Bandra-Worli Sealink: This was a great experience for all us half-marathoners. Running with the sunrise on our left was fantastic. Sure, there was no water available on the Sealink, but this only affected the marathoners who came much later.

3. Electrolytes: There should be more stalls or kiosks along the route, handing out electrolytes. Water was and is never a problem; in fact there is a lot of wastage as runners take one sip and throw half-full bottles on the road. But in the hot sun, when you also need to replace salt and sugar, it would be great to have slightly better access to Electral or similar powders or drinks.

4. Crowd control: Once the elite marathoners started reaching the finish line, the volunteers, policemen and those controlling the crowds seemed to lose interest. All across Marine Drive upto the finish line at CST, visitors and perhaps tourists, would often walk onto the road, coming in our way and making us break our stride. For those of you who somehow find the pavements of Marine Drive too small to walk on, please do this during peak traffic on working days!

5. Commentators: We can really do without idiot runners like the full-marathoner, who looked across at a 60-plus-year old woman running the half-marathon next to me and said "Aunty, this is a running race, not a walking race!" Go @7&# yourself!

6. The Drudge kilometers: For half-marathoners, the drudgery starts once you take the left from Babulnath onto Chowpatty, past Wilson college, with only 4-5 kms left. It is hot, the road is hard and your mind starts telling you that it’s not really worth the effort. This is the time when we need the most encouragement and cheering and unfortunately, once you are past the Girgaum Chowpatty junction, there is nobody on the road all the way upto the end of the Gymkhanas. This stretch is really, really, really, the toughest!

Having said all this, this year’s run was far more enjoyable than last year’s, despite being 20 minutes slower. I ran/walked, stopped if something interesting was going on, took great photographs on the Sealink, didn't freeze up at the end of the run and had no injuries. All of which is enough incentive to run next year as well!

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Posted by bhavinj at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2010

Registered for Tomorrow's Marathon? Dropping Out Because You're Unprepared? Think Again!

This is for all those, who like me, registered very enthusiastically for the half-marathon/marathon in July and were already training or had started doing so in earnest, but have since, for a variety of reasons, not been able to get into adequate shape and are now not too confident of running or are thinking of dropping out and doing a no-show tomorrow. It is for all of us who can't help but get irritated by all those stupid feel-good articles about the event, where previous runners, or the "oldest" or the "youngest" or the "100 marathon" participants are being profiled in an attempt to generate a positive buzz about the race, but which only serve to depress us further.

I started this column in December 2008, with a piece, titled "What I write about, when I write about running". I had touched upon my motivation for running and had written. "I've started focusing on the anger; on the terrorists, on the events, on the enemy. This helps pump up the adrenaline and endorphins...". This time unfortunately, there is no such "greater" motivation.

Then in May, when I started my training schedule, I wrote a piece, called "130 days", for the number of days left for the marathon. In some kind of runner's euphoria, I had actually come up with these words, "And yet in the end, it comes down to just one elemental issue. The simple act of running! Putting on a pair of shoes, with shorts or a track-suit and a T-shirt, without any fancy equipment, getting out into the open, either in a garden of sports track or on the road and pounding the ground, one foot after another, on and on, emptying your mind of all unnecessary thought, zen-like, focusing on just one goal; running." Currently, the mind that stringed this together, is a complete stranger to me!
 
And then somewhere in September/October, it all collapsed like Port-au-Prince did two days ago. There was no time to run or train. The few times I was able to shoe-up, only drove home the fact that I was out of shape and in no condition to run a targeted 2 1/2 hour half-marathon. By early-December, I had mentally decided to forego this one, simply because it made no sense at all to run without adequate training and without some kind of timing goal.

But then two things happened. The first was the announcement that we would get to run over the Bandra SeaLink. The second was a realization after speaking to some friends, that I needn't run with a purpose...I could just stay at the back of the pack, and enjoy myself, partly running, partly walking, and have a good time! The last time, I had taken the race too seriously…perhaps this time I could go there and have some fun!

Once I had filtered this idea through both, my right and left-brains, it just began to make a lot of sense. Even with a slow run/walk, you can usually finish the course in reasonable time. Moreover, what is the certainty that the Sealink will be a permanent fixture of the course next year as well? What if this is a one-time chance to walk/run on it? Would you want to miss that?

In the last few days, I have successfully sold this logic to a few of my friends who, like me, had decided to opt out, but have now decided to show up, just for the heck of it.

And as for the serious running...there's always next year.

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Posted by bhavinj at 08:09 PM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2010

Smart and Brainy = "Good" Doctor! Yeah Right!

The stultifying stupefying status of our education system is suddenly being talked about with renewed vigor, thanks to “3 Idiots”.
 
It’s not just that teachers don’t inspire. Students hardly ever ask questions and usually behave like zombies, few parents create a conducive, questioning environment at home and job-givers are rarely enthused by non-conforming job applicants. We are all equally to blame and in this collective satisfaction that no single individual or institution can be brought to task, no real change happens. The few “different” and successful experiments unfortunately only prove the rule.

This is why we have so many anomalies, for example, with doctors and medicine. Being a doctor is not really about how much you can rattle out about anatomy, pathology, medicines, surgical procedures, etc, but is more about the ability to apply this knowledge in real life, on real human beings, using all these facts to make daily judgment calls, adapting this knowledge to the individual patient in front of us, with the utmost empathy and concern, in an attempt to do as much good as possible and as little harm. And so, though knowledge is important, more important is the ability to take correct action in as caring a manner as possible.

It is this discrepancy between “brains” and “good doctors” that is responsible for this 2 x 2 grid.
1. Academically brilliant/good and a good doctor
2. Academically brilliant/good and a poor doctor
3. Academically average/poor and a good doctor
4. Academically average/poor and a poor doctor

Those who are in Group 1 are obviously the "great" doctors. They know a lot and they are able to use this knowledge for the benefit of their patients. But those in Group 3 also don’t fall short, because they have enough common sense and street smarts to be able to provide above-average care. They know where to look for and who to ask for help when they are stuck, and most importantly, they know what they don’t know.

Those in Group 4 are obviously complete disasters. But there are also a good number of doctors, who fall into Group 2, who can rattle out pages from Gray's Anatomy and Harrison’s Textbook of Internal Medicine, but somehow have no clue how to translate these facts into meaningful "care" for their patients.

In an ideal world, where learning medicine would essentially mean learning how to care, there would only be "good” doctors. There is precious little connection between the ability to mug and retain information, and caring for and treating people. The former is what we find and need in researchers and scientists; the latter is what is important in doctors. And yet, we continue to believe that if someone has come first in the XIIth standard, or has a gold medal in Anatomy or Physiology, that this person will make a great doctor some day as well. How getting 100/100 in Physics, Chemistry and Biology, teaches someone the skill-sets to be a superlative "care-giver", is something I find great difficulty digesting.

Today, fortunately, even keeping all those facts and figures in our brains is no longer relevant; most information is easily available with a few clicks of a mouse and as long as we know what to look for and where, that’s good enough. What we can’t learn however from Googling, is how to apply all this knowledge to practical problems and situations, which is where great teachers and equally inquisitive students make all the difference.

The greatest doctors in this world have rarely been the brainiest.

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Posted by bhavinj at 05:37 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2010

Simple, Healthy New Year Resolutions

Ring-a Ring-a roses
Pocket full of poses
Husha, busha
All fall down

This ditty and the game are an integral part of growing up. As part of an urban legend, many also believe that this refers to the Great Plague of London of 1665, a time when people used to fall down (die) sneezing.

Assuming it to be true, and I know that this is very depressing for the first piece of 2010, this little poem quite aptly captures the current plague of stress in our lives; first Mr. Ranjan Das of SAP and now Mr. Ravimohan of Reliance - here yesterday and then gone tomorrow; poof, just like that!

And like them, we have a large number of high-performing, type A individuals in our city, working 18-20 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, sleeping 4-5 hours, multi-tasking, traveling 10-15 days a month, drinking after work and sometimes during work, along with power naps, power lunches, power vacations, wedded to the laptop and/or the Blackberry, and constantly bothered about numbers, toplines, EBITDAs, governance and the next quarter.

Stress like this kills...

This problem is all-pervasive. While we are all gung-ho about our country’s projected growth rate over the next decade, we also have the dubious distinction of being high achievers with respect to diabetes, hypertension and similar chronic diseases, across all levels of society. Young aspiring achievers, middle managers, professionals...each and everyone seems to be falling prey to the "work hard, party hard, sleep less" syndrome.

And so perhaps the only New Year resolution that many of us should make is to “slow down, pull back and sleep more”.  Here’s my list of related simple resolutions.

Simple (in no particular order)
1. Eat only as much as needed.
2. Don't smoke.
3. Exercise - any amount is fine, even half an hour a week, though more is better.
4. Sleep - a minimum of 7 hours.
5. If you must drink, then do so with moderation. Don't get drunk. Don't eat fried food with the alcohol. Don't drink and drive.

Simple, but needs a shade extra effort.
1. Spend time with family.
2. Take breaks.
3. Try not to lose your temper - there is a difference between controlled anger and just completely losing it.
4. Meditate
5. Have sensible working hours. The French work 35 hours a week and still manage to be productive.
6. Give time to old friends.

And, if you need, there is enough help out there, in the form of social movements such as HelpYourBody (www.helpyourbody.in), which is trying to raise awareness about these health issues, hoping eventually to make our workplaces and us, healthier and less stressful. But eventually, it’s still our responsibility.  Granted that we may not have much control over the occurrence of accidents and cancer, but there is still a lot we can do to take care of our physical and mental health.

Being healthy is not just about not being sick or dying. It is also about being well enough so that when we grow old, we do so without too much disability and without ending up being burdens to our children and society.

If we want to live and die with grace, we need to live healthily. Now!

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Posted by bhavinj at 07:05 PM | Comments (0)