And what a good start to the morning

For a morning walker, keeping the body and mind in prime health is a passion zealously lived and loved throughout life,
says G.K. Sharma

MORNING walkers (MWs) are like Johnnie Walkers (JWs). They are like cousins, though not related by blood. They share bonds based on parallel obsessions. MWs carry out their activity in wide open spaces; JWs are confined to close mehfils. While the first ones are early birds, the others belong to nocturnal species. MWs are obsessed with ozone or oxygen (fresh air); JWs love fumed environment. Both are self-proclaimed scientists. MWs witness "globular clusters of night turn into ants in the day". JWs, in their trance, study the "possibility of life beyond Earth". Let us study the branch of homo-sapiens that are called Morning Walkers.

Morning walkers are of various hues and shades and are often middle-aged or old. Broadly, they fall under four categories. First, the ‘Compulsive Brats’ who top the list. Their slogan is: Musafir shab ko uthta hai, Jo jana door hota hai (The traveller (walker) gets up before dawn, if he has to travel far).

These MWs believe in the dictum ‘early to bed and early to inhale, keeps you hearty and hale’. They are the ones who are out in the open before the sky turns pink in order to benefit from the first rays of the sun. They are in a hurry to breath lungful of ozonised air before it gets polluted. They believe in fast pace and cover long distances briskly. Brisk walking is an aerobic exercise that burns calories and keeps them trim. They eulogise the virtues of Ushakaal when nature is at its glorious best.

‘Compulsive brats’ do their walking alright but they arealso out to display their walking batons or other such symbols. They believe that walking is the king of all exercises.

The second category is the ‘Yogic Brand’. They walk a little but do a lot of yoga while they carry on their inhaling or exhaling exercises. The passers-by get a feeling that a King Cobra or an Amazonian python is hissing in all its fury. They carry on their regime as squatters on the green grass. Some of them regale the onlookers with their monkey-like antics either on the ground or on the branches of the trees, when they remain suspended in various postures of legs and hands "tied and freed at intervals". A few of them do Hasya yoga as an exercise, and laugh their lungs out. Their echoing laughter takes a new MW by surprise, who, for some moments, remains in suspended animation till he becomes familiar with the practitioners of Hasya yoga. One such ardent proponent was Sardar Durlab Singh, who was for many years seen on the lawns of India Gate.

The third category is of writers and historians. They go for a constitutional. Intellectuals need the walk to freshen up their brains and to think aloud in the open. The history of Indian Parliamentary Procedure was conceived and fine tuned by the Kaul-Sakhdar duo while taking their daily stroll down Rajpath. D.P. Dhar-P.N. Haksar etched out the broad contours of the ‘Indo-Soviet Friendship Treaty’ during their walks on green lawns.

After a long trek into the forest, G.B. Shaw would start ruminating about his writings. It is said that The Arms and the Man was conceived by him during his regular morning walks. Similarly, the story goes that Leo Tolstoy, the renowned Russian author, in his magnum-opus War and Peace and Anna Karenina projected environmental scenes extensively from his birth place Yasna Polayna, where he took long morning walks amidst birch trees and serene lakes.

The fourth group of MWs are ‘The slaves of dogs and early loafers.’ The animals (dogs) decide their fate and they have to go for a walk compulsorily. When the dogs get restive and bark continuously in the mornings, it is an alarm for the escorts to be up. When the sahibs have had a late evening, the servants go for the early morning rituals. If a male is able to hook a female servant in neighbourhood, both volunteer to take the animal out ritually as it affords them a convenient meeting point away from the preying eyes. These early loafers can then plan further, after a short early morning romance.

A gem of wisdom from a regular morning walker is: "Do your early morning walking during months that have an ‘r’ in them like September, October, November.... to April. You will then be fit and fine throughout the year. The months with no ‘r’ -- May to August-- are to be avoided. Rain and humidity makes them unsuitable for pleasant and fruitful walks." But there are persons like Mr Parikh, nearing 80, who has not missed a single morning walk at Bombay’s Juhu Beach (rain or shine) in 20 years, with hardly any visit to a doctor in the last 10 years.

For a morning walker, keeping the body and mind in prime health is a passion zealously lived and loved throughout life. And the following lines are a source of perennial inspiration for any MW — "To travel on foot is to travel like Plato and Pythagoras........"