What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami

Rating - Read

I became a devoted fan of Murakami after reading Norweigian Wood (as did many others, going by the fact that it was Murakami's best selling novel). Till then, I enjoyed his writing, but not quite enough to actually admire it. Now, I was interested in knowing the person behind the writings.

And what a person he is. I had somehow envisioned Murakami as an old and wise Japanese guy, with withered hands, wise eyes, long white hair tied into a pony, and a thin, frail, mien. A man who slowly and sincerely wrote in a notebook, sitting in a house located in a picturesque place in Japan, while wearing a slightly flashy traditional dress (Even as I write this, I realise I sound like one of those people who think that everyone in India does the rope trick and has a pet snake).

Anyway, assuming he was more likely to be the type who carried the latest notepad and wore normal everyday clothes (considering the Japanese are considered to be 10 years ahead of the rest of the world), what I did not expect was to learn that he was passionate about running.

Murakami makes it quite clear, that he is first of all a writer. He runs in the time he has, over and above his writing and is not a professional runner at all. But for an amateur runner, he does very well. Having started running in his 30s, he has taken part in several marathons and started participating in triathlons sometime from his 40s. Every year, he does a marathon in the winter and a triathlon in the summer. The book covers his training while preparing for the 2005 New York City Marathon. Murakami talks not just about this race, but also about the preparations and the various races he has participated in, the feeling of doing long-distance running where you are competing mostly against yourself, the sincerity and discipline that is needed to keep going and the feelings that come during a race. In between, he also digresses into life in general, and his writings.

All of it is interesting reading despite being about experiences which an average bloke is unlikely to have in a lifetime. Murakami goes about quietly cataloguing the hours he puts in, the people he runs with, the places he lives and works in. I especially liked reading his descriptions of his body, as a machine independent of the author’s mind.

Presumably runners would be able to identify with it a lot more than I can. Infact, the book was bought for D, who participated in a half marathon for the first time last year. Yet, non-runners like me have been brought closer to the strange world of plodding on and on.

City of Bones by Michael Connelly

Rating - Read

Michael Connelly was one of the authors I had been recommended during my search for a good thriller/mystery novel.

As books go, this is a good read. Detective Harry Bosch is called to investigate the bones of a small boy, found scattered in Hollywood Hills. The bones are twenty years old, if not older. Bosch takes up the investigation, despite the general reluctance of the top team. After all, this would be a case unlikely to be solved after so long, and would not justify the time and money spent. Bosch persists and goes through with the case.

Detectives are in fashion just now. I watched the popluar TV series, Dexter, with both eyes glued to the screen (Though, the protagonist is less detective and more serial killer). I keep occasionally surfing through the CSI series. I have come to expect that most detectives in novels would be the brooding types. So to stand out from the clutter, the writing has to be good, the story interesting and the protagonists likable.

Connelly does a good job of the first two. The chapters flow smoothly from one to the other. The pages turn rapidly as you hungrily wait for the next stages to evolve – always a good sign in a novel of this genre.

Where Connelly could have done better, was with Harry Bosch. Imagine an office where you work solid hours, say from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and can be considered hardworking and dedicated. Now, imagine if you had a colleague who clocked in at 7 a.m. and clocked off at 11 p.m. and sent messages on the blackberry on the time in between. Suddenly you look like someone who spends all her time having a personal life whereas you colleague seems to be single handedly pushing the economy through.

Bosch is a bit like that. One can’t complain about him working so hard. But it is annoying to notice the manner in which he tells his partner about things, only after they have happened.

Still, I would pick up another Connelly. He is pretty good at the detective business, the minor annoyance in his protagonist notwithstanding. So if you are looking to experiment with detective stories, try this author.

The Vintage Caper by Peter Mayle

Rating – Read if you have the time

It was one of those early mornings in the airport. You are up bright and early to catch a flight. Your mind is unfortunately still on snooze mode. So you ignore the free Economic Times and Business Standard filched from the newspaper stands and go in search of ‘light’ reading to avoid actually having to scan the news till you are mentally ready for it. Thus I ended up in the bookshop and coughed up the money for this book.

The cover had a judicious sprinkling of phrases like ‘breeze of a read’, ‘feel-good book’ and also stuff about ‘leaves you thirsty for a glass of Bordeaux’ and ‘savour over a vintage rose’.

Light page turner about wine-theft. Exactly what one would call light reading. In the event, I sincerely read my newspapers on the flight and did not get around to reading this book till much later.

It is a simple enough story. Rich and brash Hollywood lawyer has his wines stolen. His insurance company, facing a claim of 3 million dollars, hires a private eye to investigate. Private Eye, promptly hotfoots it to France and spends the rest of the book drinking lots of good wine, eating lots of good food and checking out places, accompanied by his sophisticated French colleague. The book rolled nicely from one meal to the next and from one wine to the next. The culprit is caught in a manner that was absurdly reminiscent of my Famous Five days (albeit with some adult-world touches like a reigniting romance and a face-saving diplomatic solution). Not to mention the description of French food and places is always worth a read.

Perfect when you want to drift into a post-lunch siesta on a holiday.

Social Network

Last weekend, my time on social networking sites skyrocketed. Clearing my mailbox, I came across atleast two invites for Google Plus.

At this stage I must point out that I am not an active Facebook/similar stuff user. I just do not have the urge (yet) to update the world about spotting a crow outside my house or buying a yacht. So I was among the last to sign up for Orkut and Facebook (FB) and I am yet to get myself a Twitter account.

When I saw Google Plus though I got a bit excited. All the talk about ‘limited invitations’ and ‘beta testing’ made me feel like a tech pioneer and seemed like a chance to improve my mental image of myself. Exactly the effect that the marketing guys at Google were aiming for.

So I promptly used up some of my 150 invitations quota to invite various friends and family to Google Plus. Actually, I think gmail did it for me by default. I did have a pleasant time though, classifying people as ‘friends’, ‘family’, ‘people who should see your snaps’, ‘people who can give you a ride on their yacht’… you get the drift.

The instinctive organiser in me just loved this. When done, I turned to FB only to find that FB had finally woken up to privacy issues and had adopted Google Plus’s approach to user classification. Normal people would have straightaway given up after having just spent some time on a classification exercise. However, the organizer types would know that this was close to approaching Nirvana.

Compartmentalising people again!! Bring it on, I say.

So another couple of hours went by. Except in the case of FB, I actually have over 200 friends. (Short digression – I am quite sure I don’t talk to 200 people even over a period of one month. How did I end up with 200 ‘friends’, leaving aside the fact that I must have invited around 30 when I was on a particularly competitive streak to up my ‘friends list’. Actually how do people end up with 700 or 800 friends).

By the time I was finished, I had lost track of whether someone in my friends list had also ended up in my restricted list. Anyway, for good or bad, atleast I had definitely restricted viewing rights of a few people. Despite my inactive usage of FB, I still seemed to have a trail of comments and pictures that I was not happy to share with one and all.

The one good thing about the classification was that I could see comments/status updates and so on for atleast 50 people instead of the usual 5 people I normally saw. Despite categorizing my traffic, I was actually getting more not less. Yippee! If I had to classify myself in a FB user category, then I would unhesitatingly put myself down as a ‘lurker’.

I love looking at people’s photos. It is fascinating to see how the erstwhile fat acquaintance has suddenly blossomed into a svelte diva or even better when the opposite has happened. It is fun to see pics taken at ‘Bollywood theme parties’. It is nice to see pics of cute babies without the obligation of actually cooing over them. Infact, sometimes I must say I don’t like the growing privacy talks. How else does one entertain oneself on FB if all I could see was the snaps of my good friends which I can anyway get via mail or a photosharing link? (Which of course is ironic considering I did not want a few people to see my snaps online. But as they say in FB 'It is complicated')

I also like the variety of videos or articles I get exposed to. No one in my immediate friends circle would have updated a link of a fat kid dancing to Salman Khan’s numbers. But a long-ago colleague did and I could secretly chuckle at it though I would have acted all uppity if someone had asked me about the link.

I like the fact that people whom you would not have interacted with much, have interesting things to say and you make a mental note to talk to them sometime in the real world. I like to see what my young cousins from a different generation talk about (even if I am probably just seeing an edited, sanitized version)

And the really good part is that you can ignore stuff which you don’t like.

Unless you do a slight goof up in your classification. Like I did when I put an acquaintance into three different lists. Resulting in roughly 50 updates on her Farmville story. (Another digression – I have never tested out Farmville but how does one get hooked onto bringing up a fake cow in an online world. Isn’t that what people in sci-fi stories do when they are travelling to a distant galaxy and have no hope of seeing an actual farm or getting an actual pet ever?)

The takeaway from my weekend has been that Google Plus’s idea of ‘circles’ is great but I am not sure if that is good enough to move away from FB. Especially now that FB has ‘lists’. Looks like despite being invited to test the beta version, I am still going to migrate only when enough other friends have.

Your neighbourhood Thorpedo

I swam one round of freestyle.

Then one more round of breaststroke.

2 parents, 1 husband, 1 sister and 1 bro-in-law, all watched suitably impressed. They could not have been more impressed had I been swimming across the English Channel, and not merely the 5-feet deep pool in the family resort we were visiting.

Learning how to swim was indeed a pat-on-the-back achievement for me.

Going back in time, this is how it all came about.

*Begin flashback*

Age 1 – So petrified of water that I used to exhaust everyone trying to escape to corners of the tiny bathroom filled with a frustrated mom and maid.

Age 3 – I had made my peace with the fact that I was expected to bathe everyday. For the routine head-baths, the mom (and only the mom) would be permitted to keep her hand over my eyebrows for a couple of seconds while I scrunched my eyes close for 30 seconds.

This clearly indicated to the parents, that their progeny was unlikely to become a national swimming champion anytime soon. Besides, even today, unless you live in a fancy apartment complex, or belong to a sports club, it is not easy having access to a good pool. So swimming was not seen as a must-have skill.

Age 22 – Moved into fancy apartment complex (albeit in the back of the beyond) and waded into a pool for practically the first time ever.

My flatmate and I had decided to learn swimming and had signed up for classes.

Three classes later, said flatmate was floating from one side of the pool to other. I had not even managed to get myself to float horizontally, clutching to the wall.

The project was clearly doomed to failure. Besides, the early morning weekend timing was just not conducive to two 22 year olds

Mid-twenties – Move to Chennai. Resolve all over again to learn to swim. Sign up in Anna Univ.

Turn up in the pool. 1 me and 3 instructors, none of whom felt the need to get into the pool. Instead all of them shouted out instructions from the side of the pool, the last one being ‘Madam, you can shop for more ‘covered’ swimming dress’. Apparently the normal bathing suit that did not meet frumpy standards set by aunties was not modest enough.

I left

Mid-twenties – Get membership to fancy club, being less-small fish in small office pond et al. Meet the world’s best swimming instructor.

I managed to attend 10 of the 15 classes but in these 10 classes, I learnt not only to float but also come as far as doing the freestyle stroke, albeit without the correct breathing technique.

Enthused by these results, I immediately began to practice fervently. Always by the side of the pool, ready to clutch a wall when I ran out of breath.

Now, I officially declared to all and sundry that I could swim.

Early – thirties – Move to Bombay and fine a decent pool. Aim to learn breathing.

Five classes later, I realized that the pool was more crowded than the Dadar railway station.

Ditch

Early thirties – Try snorkeling at Dahab.

Under the mistaken impression that with a snorkeling mask, I would be able to swim everywhere. After all, breathing was my only problem, right?

Er..wrong. After nearly an hour of standing of swimming around the small jetty, I eventually gave up. D, who was watching out for me from the jetty, probably saw more fish.

Age 33 – Move into an apartment complex with a pool. Find a teacher who seems halfway decent and is willing to schedule classes at my convenience.

So I began to go. 2 – 3 times a week and not for daily classes. In order not to get petrified of the progress I was making. It is funny how scared you can get when you are actually making progress. Because that means you are one step closer to swimming by yourself to the deep end and that is a very scary thought.

For the best part of two months, I kept at it. Till I could finally finally actually do freestyle and breaststroke.

*End flashback*

Now that I know the basic strokes, I have realized a few things
- Learning how to swim requires persistence (though understandably most people don’t take ten years like me)
- Knowing how to swim and being able to swim like a pro who rescues drowning people are two very different things. It turns out that a lot of people are more former than later.
- Like everything else, getting better at swimming requires a LOT of practice.
- Some people are naturally gifted in the water but for most others it requires a constant overcoming of fear.

I am hoping that someday I can move from the safety of my pool to an open sea, and try snorkeling again. It is going to be a big challenge handling my fear of so much water.

But, yeah, it felt good in that resort, showing off to the family.