Ride to Hyd

Couple of days before I was to start my Pune-Hyderabad fund raising solo cycling trip in Oct 2009.... I was in a different mental state. I didn't think before making the plan and sending it across to people asking for donations; thinking just delays things so I did things spontaneously. But when, just couple of days were left, I started thinking. "Why me? Who are these people affected in flood to me? What will I gain by all this? I don't care about fame, fame is just an illusion, what will I personally gain out of all this? Why ride to Hyd, Why not just ask for donations? Why burn myself in the October sun? Who's going to greet me with a smile in Hyd when I reach there riding for 4 days?"

And I summed it up to "What's life?" Next morning at office I walked around the floor and went to every friends' desk and asked "What's life?"

Many stared back with a blank face, many said "ja ke kaam kar, tu pagla gaya hai". None gave a satisfactory answers.

Later in the day one of my project mates sent a forward mail telling me "may be this will answer it" and it did. Here it is -

"The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this, What is the use of climbing Mount Everest? and my answer must at once be, It is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. It's no use. So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for."

-George Mallory

Of course Mallory's definition of joy is not same for all. But I am glad I did the solo ride. There will definitely tougher things in life. But in those 4 days of my life I learnt a lot.

Every morning I will be charged up and the first couple of hours of ride will be fun in the morning breeze, I will feel 'this is life', I wanna do this life long.

Later, riding east, facing the sun, to a destination where I had lot of friends but none I would have been overjoyed meeting.

And without company to share my feelings, the motivation used to go down. And then all of a sudden I will start singing, songs that can change my mood and charge me up, and I will keep going for another hour and again when the motivation goes down I will start singing again.

It was not a trip which was too tasking physically, anyone with a dissent fitness can do it. But mentally it was tough.

The first day when it started getting hotter in the afternoon, I was just 100 km from Pune, Hyd was still 450 away. a small part of me said, "You can still turn back, you haven't come too far." and I immediately killed that voice telling myself "Bani when you are riding out here today, there are people working in AC offices, who sweat the moment they come out of the AC. There's a difference between their sweat and yours. You are sweating because you are doing a thing you love, a thing you have dreamt for long. This is not sweat, this is fluid of love making".

Soon I started getting company, not in the form of humans but in things we always ignore. The sugarcane farms, village kids, the fruit sellers, the silent lake and above all a Sunbird that flew with me for around 200 meters; the feeling the Sunbird gave me can't be expressed, it can only be felt.