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It All Started With the Gym - Sandhya Acharya "My name is Sandhya and I am doing an M.B.A in the U.S. Life for me is a sequence of happiness, sorrow, hopes and dreams and Writing - an expression of life."

There are habits and then there are habits really difficult to break from. Exercising was not really my thing and it takes a while to break a habit of lethargy. After tremendous effort and a severe round of positive self-talk, I found my way to the gym, yes to the gym, to play TT. My Cambodian cum French friend waited there to congratulate me on my effort. Well, the game was none dramatic and none ego boosting; but nevertheless it was a start. We now looked to our right and left to be inspired by the maestros of the game. In ones and twos they slowly came to the adjoining tables and besieged us. It was the Chinese; usually it was. Today, though, I saw an aberration. An American. An American playing T.T with a Chinese. But wait, this was getting stranger. This American also spoke Chinese. Fluently. And he practiced his TT as well as his Chinese with gusto. His tongue moved as delicately as his wrist…swish swash, ping pong, zhao zhang. I was truly amazed at what I saw.

Coming home I made my ritual call to my friend to report the trivial happenings, non-happenings and almost happenings of the day. She seemed to sound really cheerful today. Her foster family in Germany had called up and she was planning a trip to Dresden for Christmas. She had been acquainted with them when she went there on a study trip sent by her American University where she was doing her masters in German. Suddenly it struck that and me as odd that a Maharashtrian girl should want to do her Masters in German, and that too at an American university. The world suddenly seemed to be filled with oddities.

As I hung up, I heard some soulful Sri Lankan love ballads from the other room, as my roommate seemed to delve into yet another round of nostalgia. I almost knew the words now and could actually hum along. So here I am a south Indian Bombayite merrily humming a Sinhalese song. Strange strange. Time to do an inventory check of the strangeness in my life.

I had coffee yesterday with my teammate from Thailand who taught me a Thai psychological personality test. One of my friends is suffering from a broken heart. But this is no ordinary broken heart. This is an Indian heart broken by a Polish one. I find it really intriguing, though my friend would beg to differ. My Pakistani friend has recorded Turkish and Arabic music for me and is presently single-mindedly engaged in the impossible task of bettering my Urdu pronunciations. My other roommate is planning for her trip to Osaka and is learning Japanese from one of our friends in the university. I am counseling a friend who has fallen for a Korean beauty and am struggling to pronounce her name right, lest I slight him.

Oh! so what am I trying to say? Well besides the fact that I finally managed to go once to the gym, that I have friends from all over the world that have friends from all over the world…there must be something right? After all I didn’t read all the Panchatantras in vain in my childhood. There always has to be a moral to the story..to any story.. so here goes my two cents of wisdom. I am trying to make sense of the many changes in my life. Multicultural, cross-country, cross- religious. Isn’t it that a person is mostly a product of his circumstances and influences. So then what is so unique about you and me? You are just a product of your influences. Somewhere you try to refine and define but the borders have already been drawn. There is not much to fill in the canvas. Where then do we make a conscious decision to form our own opinions and choose our own life. Where then do we stand and define ourselves? Sometimes by acquainting the unknown. By questioning the completeness of the known. My values, my beliefs that I mostly knew as the only ones, suddenly become just one among many. It is a daunting task now to sift through them and validate each one of them. Validating is still fine, but when I come across something that no longer fits in after taking in my new influences, the next Herculean task is that of rejecting it. The process is tough; questioning, validating, rejecting and then, the next impossible task; that of accepting new values and new opinions. It is not easy accepting a foreign concept as yours. And it is certainly not easy giving up a familiar concept as impertinent. It is also not easy choosing which concepts are worth the change. Change. It is not just my surroundings that have changed, it is me who is changing…if I let myself. I see a rift today between what I ideologically believe in and what I actually practice. Right now, I am in doubt, but not yet convinced; in a lot of things. I might go either way, but I have begun questioning. Shruti, Yukti, Anubahava says the Gita. Scriptures, Reasoning and Experience. Read, reason experience. That is what defines you.

I may not be able to change currents especially if they are too strong; but I shall feel the wind blowing in the other direction. I shall no longer be scared to swim against the current if I have to and if I can’t muster the strength or the courage, I shall remember the experience to pass it on to some other person in a similar situation. So for now, I shall just enjoy the experience. The whole of it - Chinese, American, German, Polish, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Korean and Japanese and mull over all the strangeness in my life. It all started with the gym.

Till we connect again...

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