Editorial

I didn't quite realize when I turned 45. I mean inside, I still feel I am 25. Just the other day I was 47 kgs, roaming around in skinny jeans and tees in my college campus. And here I am. 45, 87 kgs and what do you know, still roaming around in skinny jeans and tees. Just a different campus. :-) 

But this year I felt it for the first time. Age. First it was physical. I noticed that injuries happen more easily and frequently and take more time to heal. Then when I was in Manipur on my solo ride, there was a realization one night, that I am going to be 46 in a few months, which means in the next 4 years, 50. Unsettling...! But mostly put many things into perspective. I gotta freakin' hurry...!

I started getting lazy in 2019. I decided I needed to take it easy and enjoy life a bit. I was wrong. Getting lazy is a habit. Once you let go one thing, you let go another and soon you are not writing 3.47 am any more.

So this year onwards, I am going to try to get back to my pre-2019 habits. I will set and pursue my goals more diligently, try to write more regularly and get dogged about everything again.

Every year it was a small move forward. This year, the changes are going to have to be more dramatic.

I am 45 going on 46. I can slowly see the impact that age has on the body. Injuries are healing slower, workouts recovery is slower, getting back into discipline after a break is slower. Overall, I am getting slower. It just means I need to eat cleaner, drink more water (and less alcohol ;-) and get more disciplined with my workouts.

I can't afford breaks because recovery takes more time. So I can't afford injuries which means I will have to lift less heavy. So to keep myself challenged I will have to rely more on body weight trainings and higher repetitions. But more importantly, warm ups and cool down stretches become more important than the training itself. And cardio. Lots of cardio.

This is a new learning process and I will try to log my learnings in 2022 about "fitness after 45".

2021 was a horrible year when it comes to reading. Target was 60 which means 5 books a month. I must have done 15 tops. So to keep myself strong on my goal, I will log here some of the interesting books that I read and maybe you will find them interesting too:

1. "Break Out Nations" by Ruchir Sharma - I have recently developed an interest into macro economics and policy making. A very interesting book that talks about nations that have the potential of becoming a super power.
2. "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - This one is about how to be happy. This starts with how we humans were built over the last 300,000 years since we were primitive men and goes to describe what happiness really means.
3. "Guns, germs and steel" by Jared Diamond - I survived this one. It is an anthropological perspective of man. After reading "Sapiens", I was recommended this one. Good, but extremely dry and full of statistical data. A very slow book
4. "Noise" by Daniel Kahneman - The last Daniel Kahneman book I read was "Thinking fast and slow" and I had found it fascinating. So I tried this one. Good concept and I have read only the first 2 chapters, but I am not that impressed so far. Talks about why and how the human brain makes errors and processes them. Maybe it will pick up pace in the later chapters.

I was riding with my friend Niroj in Arunachal Pradesh. I have already written about the Hunli experience in one of my previous newsletters, but just to give a quick recap, we were traveling to Anini and decided to stay at Hunli because we wouldn't have made it to Anini before nightfall. And it was cold and dark and the roads were dangerous with slush and a gorge on the side. So it may not have been the best idea to rough it out. And it turns out that the Reh festival was going on and they were celebrating it in the village centre in Hunli. After getting fresh, we went there to see how they celebrate and made friends with a few locals. Turns out they believed that their ancestors had come in our form to meet them or their ancestors had sent us and wanted them to give us a feast or something like that. They welcomed us and we ate and drank and even smoked some opium.

In conversation they kept talking about Mithun, an animal that they considered holy. They said it is a very docile animal and that they love and worship it. It is also considered a sort of currency. The more mithuns you own, the richer you are. And in marriages the groom's father pays dowry in mithuns, considering it is a matriarchal system. The more healthy, hard working, educated daughter a man has the more mithuns he gets in her marriage. Turns out the mithun is the bison. And not only that, it also turns out that they eat it. Wierd isn't it. And they do truly respect the animal and pray to it. In fact they eat the mithun, but they very carefully control the population of the Mithun in the forests. They make sure they don't eat too many of them. And they provide a healthy environment for them to breed.

So I asked them how they kill it considering it is so big and strong. They said they just break its legs with a Dau (a kind of machete) and when it falls down they behead it. I know it sounds very cruel and ghastly. But that's their culture. They consider it holy and they don't think that killing or eating something that they consider holy is cruel or ghastly. It is just unfathomable for us because we grew up in a very different culture. 


This why I travel. It gives me a very different perspective about things. A point of view that I never even knew existed. It changes you. Forces you to see things from another man's eyes. Makes you a more wholesome and complete person.

Of course another benefit is the time away from the wife, but hey... Let's not talk about that. She reads this sometimes... ;-)