To Run Free

In the summer of 2019 I bought myself a fitness tracking watch. It wasn't fancy at all. In fact it was a hopelessly rudimentary "tracker" that didn't even have in-built GPS to track a run. I still just wore it and amused myself by looking at my heart-rate during my runs. At least I had a stop-watch on hand. 

I used to "track" my runs by visiting google maps after my runs and painstakingly redrawing the route I took. It was annoying because google constantly tries to optimise the distance, so if you ran from point A to point B, you need to add several stops enroute to retrace your path exactly. Further, I would run on pure instinct and go down random streets just to look around - a nice way to explore my locality, but it made my runs harder to track. 

If someone back then asked me my best 5k pace, I would have no idea. I never really thought about tracking my runs, firstly because I didn't know others were doing it and secondly, because I felt this is contrary to the spirit of running. Running for me was always about pure joy and instinct. Run as far and fast as you possibly can just to feel the high. I had no fitness goals, no target body-weight, nothing. Measuring your runs and trying to improve your numbers felt like something that would kill the joy of running. 

At some point, a couple of my friends took to posting screenshots of their runs from Nike's run-tracking app. And another friend bought me a fanny pack for my birthday, since he knew I go on runs occasionally and he thought it would be useful for me to carry stuff on the run. Before that I never carried my phone on runs - just my home-keys and a 5 Euro note. The 5 Euro note was in case I was feeling faint and needed to rush into a store to buy a chocolate or an energy drink. I've never had to use it, but I still always carry a few Euros with me. 

I disliked carrying my phone because of how they bounce around in the pockets and also because I felt that my running time doubled-up as my break from screens and devices and gadgets. It was the time to let my mind wander and just enjoy the outside world to live in the moment.

Once I had my new fanny pack, I could carry my phone. The truth is that no matter how much you hate the fact that you're addicted to your phone, you remain addicted to it. And you will carry it with you every chance you get. I started taking my phone with me and started tracking my runs on the Nike app. The joy for running being killed by numbers and statistics? Screw that, let's play with this new toy! 

The trouble with numbers is this weird human desire for nice, round numbers, whole numbers or numbers that are direct multiples of the number of fingers we have. I would run maybe 5.8 km and feel like stopping, and then say wait, why not round off the last 200 metres to make it a nice 6 km run? 

This was also an unseasonably cold spring in Rome, with temperatures staying close to 0 degrees for long periods even in March. Something about the pandemic made me want to be outdoors and be physically active - I had hated staying cooped up indoors for months and months with seemingly no end in sight.

I ran in forced, small bursts throughout the late winter and spring until it paid off in the summer. Once the weather got warmer, I truly hit my stride, going on some really long runs, covering distances I never thought I could. 

Running brings me a very deep joy. So doing it in an unstructured way, doing it instinctively and just for the heck of it gives great joy as well! Structuring it and chasing statistics can make it more of a chore than it should be. What I eventually realised though, is that being structured and strategic about it makes you a better runner, so it can bring you even more joy in the long run (pun intended). 

I found this out in April and May of 2021 when I ran over 250 km in just these two months, distances I tracked with my running app on my phone that I carried in my fanny pack. It still wasn't extremely structured, for I didn't have any long-term running or fitness goals. But I would leave the house thinking on the lines of - "today I should run 8 km" and this meant sometimes I had to hold back even when I wanted to run as fast as my legs would carry me just for sheer joy. 

My rhythm broke later in the summer (Italian summers go all the way to September) because I got rather busy with wrapping up my PhD. At that point I had come up with a quote that I'm really proud of - "PhD is what happens between running to forget your codes and forgetting to run your codes" :D :D 

I ended up running over 350 km in 2021 since I started tracking it properly. But as I said above, most of it this was just in the space of two months when this little son of the tropics felt really good to feel the warmth of the sun again. 

Come 2022, I decided to set a running target for the entire year - 1000 km. Maybe another day I will write about how this is going, but to make a long story short, I am on course to end up with somewhere between 750 to 800 km by the end of December. And while I'm disappointed, I'd like to give myself reasonable credit. I had lost all my stamina in January after a few months of no running. For the first attempt at a long-term running goal, with my schedule being constantly disrupted by travel, my thesis defence, job interviews and finally moving countries, it's a solid effort. 

Anyone who knows anything about the world of running knows Eliud Kipchoge, the absolute master of long-distance running. The greatest ever, other than some of our cavemen ancestors who probably casually achieved such feats while stalking prey and running from volcanos. In fact, I only know the name of one active long distance runner - Kipchoge's! 

Kipchoge has a beautiful quote. "Only the disciplined ones in life are free. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods and your passions."

It's something extremely deep and something that has really speaks to me. When we speak of freedom, we always think of it in terms of the freedom to "do as we please", which is to say, the freedom to pursue our desires and passions, the freedom to simply follow your mood. Discipline is the exact opposite, it is to force yourself to not follow your mood. 

Maslow's (disputed) theory of the hierarchy of needs places at the very top "self-actualisation". "What a man can be, he must be." I would even say that this is the zeitgest of our times. Popular culture is replete with cliches like "You be you". "Follow your heart." People are often said to travel or do some things to "find themselves", that is, to find some kind of true self hidden within themselves so they can understand it and fulfil the passion and destiny of this alleged true self. 

I don't know if self-actualisation itself is actually contrary to Kipchoge's thoughts on freedom. But to "just be yourself" is to be a slave to your immediate mood and passion. To be truly free is to actually shackle yourself in a purposeful, disciplined way. The freedom to pursue your every desire and mood, to "let yourself be", is a way to shackle yourself to your mood. And mood is fickle.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig asks "How to be a perfect painter?". The answer, in his book (pun intended), is to become a perfect person and then paint naturally. I have explored this idea further in a previous blog post - https://mavinahanu.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-perfect-painting.html

I'm nowhere near a perfect person nor a perfect runner, but today I cannot simply run "naturally". Or I would prefer to say, what is natural to me has completely changed. I have become a more disciplined person, more in control of what I want to do. So when I run for joy, or run "naturally", it is still very precise. I don't overdo it. I am clear about how far I can run at what speed, how much energy I need to save for the rest of the workday, etc. But I know that someday, when I'm truly exhausted and tired, when I'm having a terrible off-day, if I want to run it off and experience some catharsis, I can run it off far longer and far faster than I would have dreamed to be capable of even 18 months ago when this all kicked off. In that sense, I am truly more free to run. If I had simply continued to run naturally, to do it as and when I have the mood to do it, for only as long as the mood lasted, I could have never have been this free. 

There are two footnotes to add here. The first is that this journey towards discipline has been slow and gradual. I should make it clear that I'm still quite an indisciplined person who very very often misses personal targets and just gives up and follows my immediate mood. It's just that these developing thoughts have made me constantly conscious that I want to move in the direction of more discipline, even if I'm miles and miles away.

The second is that growing up, my father always stressed greatly on discipline and good habits,. And we would get lectured by elders on how we would eventually "realise" that they were right all along while I would roll my eyes. Well, I guess all the world's a stage, and this is an eternal drama that keeps repeating. And we will one day just repeat the words of our parents to our kids, while they repeat our words back to us. To say it simply, my parents were right about this :(

Discipline is freedom.

DEVELOP

If there's an ideology that abounds in the civic works of Bengaluru city, it is something I would call developmentalism. Concretisation might be a better word, but developmentalism has a better ring to it. 

Many thoughts have been triggered in my head ever since I learnt to drive in Bengaluru. I recall moving slowly and very cautiously behind a child on a tricycle with an autorickshaw blaring its horn from behind me on a narrow residential street. I remember thinking how one small misstep or lapse in concentration from me could be fatal to an innocent, blameless child just wanting to ride his tricycle. I don't know if he was supervised by an adult.

It took me back to something written on twitter by an urban planner. He asked how come we are okay with a 1000kg mass of metal moving on roads and forcing parents to stop children from going out on the streets out of a legitimate fear of a road accident. Is the transport of an individual more important? Or is giving children a safe space to run around and play near their homes more important? Cast in this way, as heavy masses of metal that move at speed right through living areas, we can see that cars and automobiles in general are fuel guzzling, carbon emitting monsters endangering the lives of pedestrians, especially children. 

I don't want to be a Luddite. I am fond of technology and I genuinely believe that overall, the world has become a better place to live because of it. That's not to say it is all good - our water bodies are choked with contaminants, the high mountains are awash with micro-plastics while the oceans are filled with not-so-micro plastics. The soil and the air have turned toxic and we're steadily moving towards a world where climate extremes are much more frequent and a mass extinction is ongoing. In the middle of all this though, somehow the lives of billions of humans have been improved [citation needed]. 

Let's refocus on Bengaluru rather than looking at the entire world. When I visited in November 2020, soon after the first wave of the pandemic, the city was quieter than it's usual self. One morning I went for a run near Sankey Tank but I was frustrated by the fact that they were doing some construction work in and around the walking trail there. I skipped and jumped over construction debris and slush and ran, but didn't return after that. 

When I came again in November 2021, the place was still under construction! The worst part - they were concreting the entire walking trail. Hard trails are known to be particularly terrible on the knees for runners. Tripping and falling on rough concrete surfaces cause much deeper cuts and scratches than a simple mud trail. Concrete doesn't allow plants to grow, it stores heat and radiates it out at night, making the immediate surroundings a little hotter. Children can't play on it because children fall often. Basically, a concrete trail is not good for any demographic of people who want to come to Sankey Tank. 

What's wrong with a simple mud trail? (see here for a nice example) If there's enough grass and greenery around and the right type of mud is used, it will not get very slushy in the rain. Doing this is obviously much cheaper than preparing tons of concrete. It's better for runners, it doesn't absorb heat, it allows rainwater to seep through and recharges ground water. 

The problem is that the folks at BBMP, and in general the policy-makers, are smitten by this ideology of developmentalism. It calls for maximum human intervention everywhere and to make everything look like it has been worked on a lot. Things have to look "modern". And it should not be cheap. 

We often see the news about some controversial remarks made my politicians at an election rally or public speech. We might watch these snippets of such a speech. The next time though, take about an hour or two out of your day and watch an entire election speech given in a rural part of the country. In the run-up to the 2018 elections in Karnataka, I watched a couple of speeches and there were two aspects that caught my attention. First, is just how bloody boring they get. (Now I don't blame Mr. Siddaramiah for infamously falling asleep at public meetings). And secondly, how much of the speech is about how much money was "released" for various schemes and programmes. So many crores allocated for this, so many crores for that. 

Imagine if Sankey Tank could be made into a nice, shady, walkable park with just ₹ 5-10 lakhs. That would be an outrage to the developmentalists! It needs to look upgraded, not just improved. It needs to be visible that something big was done. That somebody intervened here.

It's not only innocent walking trails around nice lakes that bear the brunt of this. Every road in Malleswaram is currently witness to the ravages of this ideology. Every road being "white-topped" is testament to this ideology. (white-topping is the word used to mean replacing tar roads with concrete roads) The idea is that we need BIG roads for BIG cars and these roads should be widened and made of concrete so people can reach very fast and very smooth until the next jog-jammed signal. Look, I'm a huge fan of roads which aren't filled with potholes. I understand that roads need to be widened. But at some point shouldn't we stop to understand that if we add one extra lane while 1,000 new vehicles are registered in the city on a daily basis, the extra lane doesn't matter anymore. A rant on the slow pace of the metro, the travesty of the lack of public transport options to places like the airport, the criminally underutilised railway lines in the city and the shrinking fleet of BMTC buses is for a separate blog post perhaps. 

Delays in infrastructure construction are a fact of life in every single part of the world. I'm not upset that the construction of the metro is taking decades when it should have taken years. I'm upset that the thinking (assuming there is some thinking) is to simply keep building bigger and bigger and bigger roads when the immediate need is to DE-congest the roads. No amount of fly-overs and underpasses and signal-free corridors will save you from congestion if you have so many cars on the street. And people will keep buying and using cars as long as there is no alternative.

Cast your eyes behind Mantri mall and you will see a bluish-gray monstrosity coming up, a rectangular glass building. Unimaginatively coloured, ugly glass in a tropical city that sees single digit temperatures maybe 2-3 times a decade. Look at the footpath in front of your house - before they were made from sturdy slabs of stone called "chapdi kallu" in Kannada. Now it's the same stone but with a nice polished finish. Why? They're slippery in the rain, especially when they're slightly sloped. But it needs to LOOK modern and man-made. 

Now the footpaths along large roads are being stripped of these big stones and being replaced with tile-like arrangement of concrete blocks. Because you can't have ancient stones next to a nice, swanky concrete road, can you? Doesn't matter that they're just there, supporting the weight of people and trucks which park on the pavement, with a nice rough surface that you don't slip on. Sure, some of them are shaky and could use a bit of cement at the joints, but that's very easily fixable. Incremental and simplistic changes are out of the question. There has to be a bombastic announcement that so many zillion crores are going to be spent to build this huge thing. Making it "smart".

Developmentalism cannot believe that something that has just worked for a long time can continue to serve its purpose without a fuss. Maybe bureaucractism is the better word - where activity is treated as achievement. "Dynamism" as a virtue. We have to go to a place, rip everything out and put something new while spending a lot of money. Understanding the purpose of what is being done, actually improving the place, is secondary.

This can be seen in overly gaudy airport (glass) buildings and even in the Statue of Unity, the statue of Sardar Patel. The statue looks quite imposing in pictures and it's height is certainly impressive (the tallest statue in the world). I will definitely visit it when I get the chance, but for me the most criminal aspect of the statue is how much it lacks in aesthetics. There's no intricacy, no art. Just a mass of concrete chasing some illusory world-record. Developmentalism can build a statue of unity, but never a monument like the Channakeshava temple at Belur.

I want to emphasise here that I'm neither against human intervention nor building things anew. I am strongly for modern air-conditioned metro rail systems, wide highways and expressways connecting major cities, faster trains, higher buildings and all that is generally termed development. Urbanisation is a net good for people and for the environment. Technology has so many solutions which will be adopted at breakneck speed - like electric cars and solar power and so many more. But I break at the point where we "develop" for development's sake, because we want to feel like we're developing.

PS - It's August 2022 and the concreting of the Sankey Tank walking trail is still underway.

The Outcome or the Principle?

There's something I've always wondered about morality. And recent events have simply made me wonder more. The question is simple - is morality about doing the right thing that flows from ethical principles? Or is it ensuring that given one's overall knowledge of a situation, to ensure that the least worst outcome is brought about. Let me explain using two of the biggest geo-political events from the last one year, both of which made me wonder about the same thing. 

First, the chaotic circumstances in which troops of USA withdrew from Afghanistan got me thinking about what they were doing there in the first place. Most of the media reporting it was talking about how Taliban rule would be disastrous for women and girls in particular. I think we can all agree that the education of girls and making sure that they are not simply confined indoors to be at the beck and call of others is a moral endeavour. Today with the Taliban, there exists (reportedly) a blanket ban on girls attending school. 

So let us consider a hypothetical administration in the same country which decides to reverse this ban and take more steps in a similar direction towards what is broadly termed women's empowerment. Now, let us say that the current elites, the Taliban or in general whoever runs the show in Afghanistani society find these ideas so despicable that they are ready to launch an entire nation into an infinite crusade where they are ready to spill the blood of lakhs of their fellow countrymen but will simply not tolerate these steps. Of course, this isn't the exact scenario that played out, but in the American framing of the conflict, it was said that an American-backed administration would bring democracy, freedom and women's rights to the people of Afghanistan - so my hypothetical scenario isn't completely different from reality. It is merely extremely simplistic, ignoring the multiple layers involved, starting from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 

So is the endeavour to bring an administration that promotes women's education a moral one? Maybe an easier way to frame it - let's say there's a person in a house doing something terrible - maybe beating up a defenceless child. And the person says that he has access to kerosene and a matchstick, so if anyone comes to the aid of the child, he will burn down the entire building. And you know for a fact that this person has shown this kind of behaviour before and that he has a large quantity of kerosene. Is it moral to try and save the child? Even more, is it moral to have the hubris to think that you will be able to save the child and stop the fire, when you actually don't? Can you defend that act by saying yours was an act of saving the child alone? 

Let's look at Ukraine - if we know for a fact that the Russian military is far superior to the Ukrainian military, is it moral to send arms to Ukraine? Of course Ukraine has a right to defend itself. Of course, it is Russia that is the aggressor, the immoral actor here. It is useless to say that Russia shouldn't have attacked Ukraine. Now that Russia has already attacked Ukraine, the moral action would be to force Russia into halting it's assault and withdrawing her army. Clearly no one is willing to put everything into stopping Russia. So is asking Ukraine to fight on moral? Is asking Ukraine to simply surrender the real moral option?

I always think of a small garrison held by a chieftain with a small fort. And the empire's huge army comes rolling in, asking him to surrender. The chieftain is blameless. He lived honorably and now the emperor is refusing to grant him what is rightfully his. He's in a fortified position, ready to fight unto death. So every man in his army is probably worth about 5-10 men of the empire's army. The empire's army is in the open field and vulnerable. They also are pragmatic, so they are held back. If they see an weakness they can exploit, but with the loss of a few men, they will not charge into it. They will wait it out. Because they know eventually, they will overwhelm the chieftain. They vastly outnumber the chieftain's forces. Surely the chieftain is immoral for leading his people into certain defeat and death, even if he is the one who has been wronged. 

The question is, in the face of immorality and might, what is morality to be judged on? The principle, or the outcome? 

This blog post could have been a paragraph long and asked the same question, but I just wanted to paint my mind's picture.

On the Installation of Netaji's Statue

Hate is a strong word. Stronger than disapproval. Stronger than finding someone's actions immoral or deplorable. It suggests a level of personal emotional investment. 

Recently it was announced that Netaji Subash Chandra Bose's statue would be installed at India Gate. And a certain prominent voice on twitter called it as the "sullying" of India Gate by a man who was "pals with Hitler". Honestly, all I know about Netaji is pop-history, the regular, fan-fictionalised, hagiographical accounts that we hear from everywhere around us. But it's quite clear that he had even met Hitler. He was firmly on the side of the axis powers in World War 2. 

Even more, I am under no illusions about the imperial Japanese. I have read about how their army treated prisoners of war, who traveled with their army camps and their actions in China. Does this mean Netaji shouldn't be honoured in India? 

(A small aside - the presence of the Japanese in Indonesia actually greatly hastened their independence from the Netherlands. The Japanese saw themselves as the liberators of Asia from European colonialism. Again, everyone claims great moral end-goals for their self-interest, so there's no need to get too carried away by such pronouncements either).

Essentially, Netaji wanted to get rid of the British so badly that he was ready to join the camp of whoever was willing to promise that end-goal to him. Today, it's considered improper to even approve of, never mind glorify, the actions of someone associated with Hitler. Here was a man who actually carried out some of Hitler's plans in the name of freedom from the British.

There's a stronger point to be made here. To an Indian, especially looking at it from the lens of today rather than the 1940s, the British and the Japanese and the Germans and the Soviets were all mass killers and perpetrators of genocide. There are several complications when it comes to the relationship between the British and independent India. For example, the Indian armed forces, their traditions and legends are inherited from the British Indian army. This was an army commanded by Britishers to serve British imperial needs and interests and even became bullet fodder across the world as a "voluntary" army. 

Certain divisions and the regiments of the army may glorify the deeds of valour by these Indians. It's unimaginable today, but an army comprised of a majority of Indians sacked Beijing 120 years ago. Certainly, individuals may have shown exemplary courage, but must an Indian feel proud of this? When it was never our war and we never had any cause (until the 1950s) for enmity with the Chinese? I totally agree that India Gate and the names of the soldiers who were killed in action during the first World War is a symbol of our colonial past. It's natural that we are only slowly developing a national consciousness that points out things like these. It isn't that those who came before us were insufficiently patriotic, it's hard to point out something omnipresent and given as received wisdom. Before we were told to salute all those who died fighting "for India" in world war 1. Today we say, "Ummm, yes, they were our brave countrymen who performed great deeds, but weren't they just pawns of the British?"

Coming back to the question of who to hate - there are many deplorable characters in history. Hitler. Churchill. Aurangzeb. They say Gengis Khan killed so many people that his exploits led to an increase in the green cover across the world and had an impact on reducing greenhouse gases. 

But today the name of Gengis Khan doesn't evoke hatred, just mild historical curiosity and wonder. It's not admiration, it's just "Oh yeah, he did some terrible stuff" or a dispassionate "he was barbaric". What separates this from hatred? For example, to the extent that mere association with a person is a terrible sin? No one gets called "literally Gengis Khan" on the internet.

I think the distinction comes from cultural sensibilities and the living memory of people. What historical memories have people (and education systems) chosen to enshrine in their collective memories. The elevation of Hitler and his actions as some kind of original act of genocide is in my opinion totally unfounded. There are so many characters in history who, if they had access to the chemicals that the Nazis had, would have happily used it on large populations. To pretend this was never the way of the world until Hitler did it is disingenuous. It means internalising the (well-justified) horror of Europeans by the whole world. I'm not European. My lens is different.

If there's a historical character I hate, it's Winston Churchill. His actions killed millions of Indians. Of course, today he's a hero in the eyes of the British. I think a discerning person, not given to constant outrage, should be able to digest that quite easily - that a person can be a tyrant for one set of people and a hero for another set of people. Ahmad Shah Abdali is a known as a great conqueror and the father of the modern Afghanistani state. In India he's an invader, a looter and a destroyer. Same with Nadir Shah.

I would never demand that the British cease to glorify Churchill or that Afghanistan stops calling Abdali the father of their nation. I think the state of the world where everyone unanimously agrees on one set of good guys and one set of evil guys is not only artificial, it will end up imposing the emotions of one set of people (northern and western Europeans) on everyone else. A mature person should recognise this simple fact. So yes, while I do not demand the take-down of Churchill's current-day statues, I also do not hate Hitler. He was one man among many tyrants of the past who committed gruesome, deplorable acts.

I could never put him in the same bracket as Churchill or General Dyer or Aurangzeb. And I have absolutely no problem glorifying someone who worked with him - he worked against the British to get them out of India and established self-rule - and that is most important for me, not some alleged overarching morality of the allied powers.

Jai Hind! 

Azad Hind Fauj zindabad!