Marathon - Gamifying Fitness

Missed this year's Mumbai marathon, but should be back next year. The whole experience of my dream run in 2013 and 2014 had been just awesome. While the marathons had been full of energy, fun and a lot of fan fare, the preparations for the same changed my outlook at looking at fitness. Though I still have those extra kilos still refuse to part with me, the discipline to continue morning walk/jog without fail has brought in a lot of energy and feel good factor in my daily routine.

I think the whole concept of marathons has gamified the fitness regimes. The Borivali National Park earlier used to have mostly elderly folks taking their walk, but last 3-4 years it's bustling with the energy of runners. The best part about it is that it's a collaborative sport. People encourage each other to do better, continue and not to miss the practice. The competition if at all is with self, in an attempt to do better at timings than yesterday, which I think is the best kind of competition. There is a great sense of achievement, pride, times when we endure healthy diet, test our limits or just understand our body.

It's like playing games, doing better all the time wanting to go to the next level and checking with friends at what level they have reached. With many smaller marathons that have sprung up in recent times. I think it's easy to keep up the tempo. It's really heartening to see young generation crowd waking up early and sweating it out in the mornings rather than just being lazy in their beds. Certainly a positive sign to move towards a healthier tomorrow.

And further the gamification on portals where we can pledge the km we will run or cycle or jog etc, and log every day gives a great dose of motivation.

Before winding up the blog, I should surely mention the ultra marathoners. We used to see many of the marathoners running up and down the mountains in shorts and thin sports t-shirts while we would be clad in all layers of clothes! I also read up a lot about ultra marathons then where people run like 100-150 kms across difficult terrains and have really pushed the boundaries of what their bodies can achieve. Very very interesting discussions of these marathoners on how their experience made them rethink about life and how they approach everyday things.

So long live the marathons and hope those help us build a healthier tomorrow

Do we know what we want to achieve in life?

Do we really know what we want to really achieve in life? Probably No? and to me that's the beauty of life. Discovering ourselves, our passion and learning new things about ourselves is what probably makes life more interesting than setting the target and running after that.

As kids we were often asked this question. The answers differed as we grew in age from bus driver to postman to fireman to air hostess to PT Usha to settle in US and what not. It all depended on what fascinated us at that point. I really hope that today's youth wants to join ISRO after our greatest success story of MOM. Even now when into a career, we still keep changing the stuff that we do. Reasons could be boredom, compulsion, finding something more interesting or pure lethargy or anything else that I could think of.

I myself have so many ideas about what I want to do. Hundreds of those ranging from be a writer, be a musician, get into an arty crafty thing, be a teacher, be a technologist, an enterprise architect, an Agilist, a great speaker and many more things professionally, and be a great mother, daughter, wife, friend, colleague, mentor, a person with integrity, humility, courage, social worker and so on personally.

I just see the list changing all the time. I had never thought that I may participate in marathon, even if it's a very short distance like 6 km, or learn Quilling in turn helping my daughter win greeting card/bookmark competition. But I found those interesting and ended up doing that in my life! Not sure what new things I may stumble across, find interesting and put efforts to achieve those.

I read that the new generation may have as many as 17 different distinct careers in their life. I find it extremely interesting phenomenon when people change their careers completely. A friend from my engineering college got into TV serials completely, and we hear so many stories of people leaving their plush jobs for the sake of contributing back to society.

It's also interesting to see people finding new things in their profession and achieving excellence there. Even at this age Amitabh Bachchan is able to find challenging work and deliver awesome performances. I am in the awe of Dr. V who after retirement founded the Arvind Eye Clinic, the McDonalds of Eye Care. I guess these guys found their passion or purpose of their life and have jumped into it. In general what we want to achieve could lie anywhere in between "Giving my two cents" to "Making a dent in the Universe".

On a lighter note, I wonder what is it that Sachin Tendulkar would want to do now that he has accomplished so much and retiring at such young age!

Here's a wish that the journey of finding what we want to achieve and then achieving it in itself becomes thoroughly enjoyable at every point in life for each one of us, and we get opportunity to reinvent ourselves all the time, or at least sometimes! Amen!

Rambo Circus and thoughts related to HR

We visited the Rambo circus on Sunday. Advertised as fully air conditioned Italian tent, and with online booking on bookmyshow :) Brought back many memories. 

When I was a child, there was a small ground behind our house and in holidays a circus would often come there. It would be around 400-500 m far from our buildings and we would clearly hear the roaring of tigers n lions at night. A lion getting free, claiming 2 floors of our building and entering my house was often my nightmare during those days! But the lions were not so lucky!!

Nowadays they are luckier and they no longer have to listen in to the ring masters' orders. We can only see elephants, dogs, horses and sometimes birds in the circus now. All other animals are banned I believe. Not sure when luck would shine on these animals :)

My kids loved the acrobats and stunts that the artistes performed. It looked like a combination of "India's Got Talent" and Khataron ke Khiladi to them. Just on 31st night, they had seen a Chinese street artist performing stunts with a huge ring and now they could see it live! Most of the stunts evoked 'OMG, I won't be able to even try this!' in my mind, and I would label the stunts as never try this, or may be you can try while standing on mattress at home for the kids. Not that they would listen, but a feeble attempt as a parent nevertheless! 

I loved the stunts performed by 2 Latin American artistes. It was jaw dropping to see them walk and jump on the outer ring of the moving rings. See the photo below.

I kept wondering about what would motivate the individuals performing these stunts in sticking to this career.   What would make people join this profession and move to different continents to work. I have seen artistes from Africa and Latin America performing here in India so often. Many others may be really in need for work and joining this. But my sense is that the rush they must be feeling inside of them and the applause they would get after performing the stunts might be their poison. It must be a great satisfaction in itself. That might be driving them to practice well, go out perform and call the circus their home.

We all know that circus is a dying form of entertainment. The costs of running the show are huge. Keeping animals like elephants, feeding them is a huge task in itself.

But most importantly, the main assets of this profession are the artistes, and talented skilled ones. To produce or find them, convincing them to work for a dying profession would be even more difficult. They might even be facing issues like poaching, and when everyone has a special skill that's giving them a job, I am sure people won't be ready to create a backup as well. Age would also impact their performance as they would not be as swift.

It would be very interesting to see how these people issues are handled in these shows, and see if we can apply any in our teams. Hope I make time sometime to do that in my life  :)

Rocking Rangoli from South of India

My love for drawing rangolis dates back to my childhood, when I along with my friends spent hours to draw the colourful rangoli designs during Diwali vacations. It was a traditional art passed on by my grandmother and my mother, and I cherished it with passion. Over years I learnt a new form called Sanskar Bharti which was to draw ever expanding and large Rangoli designs. My practice however dwindled to only a few instances during important festivals as I got busier in life.

One of the times I really enjoyed making Rangoli designs was during the annual decorations in my office. It is such a joy. I learnt to make really big designs, put shades into the colours all right there. Making it along with colleagues surely made it more enjoyable.

Yesterday during the celebrations, I enjoyed every moment of making the Rangoli. We did two different forms of it. The theme was South of India. First was a traditional Onam flower rangoli that depicted a Kathakali dancer's face. It looked so awesome with all colourful bright flowers bringing it alive, and the fragrant rose petals brought a magic to it. Pure awesomeness. The design was inspired by the image below:

Another one that I always wanted to try was the traditional Kolam rangoli that the South Indians draw using rice flour. The designs looked complex, and always mesmerized me. I wanted to learn and try it out, and yesterday was a perfect chance :) I tried this one using a white chalk on a brown chart paper, and it turned out to be pretty neat. I think the trick here was to know how to draw those parallel 4 lines such that those intersect with each other forming 5 squares. But I really loved the experience. It was inspired by this design I found on the Internet.

Looking forward to trying out more complex designs from the South of India in this year :)