CYCLE AND CYCLING

 From Sampath's Desk:

CYCLE AND CYCLING

WORLD BICYCLE DAY - JUNE 3

When it keeps going, you are steadily on the move; but if it stops, you lose balance and fall. I hope you guess it right. Yes, it is a bicycle which, according to me, is one of the simple yet marvelous inventions that has always fascinated me. I have always wondered how a simple two-wheel mechanism has revolutionized the transport system what with the state-of-the-art, feature-cum-comfort rich and automated two-wheelers flooding the roads today, as a natural corollary leading to improved versions of this great contraption!  

 

Most of us would have learnt cycling in our boyhood/girlhood days. Starting as a fun-making exercise, it lays a strong foundation for driving different types of vehicles later in life. Everyone would have had experiences, different though, while learning and practicing cycling with a fall, slip, skid, dash against objects including persons, getting injured in the process, etc. being inexorable.

 

In those days and perhaps even now, the cycle-shops hire out bicycles of different sizes catering to the needs of children and adults of different age. I started learning cycling at age 7-8 more out of peer group influence and pressure. Initially, someone would help you balance the cycle (mostly a peer), the cardinal principles to be followed being sitting straight on the cycle-seat, not to wriggle or squirm the body obliquely and keep pedaling slowly, to start with. As one gains confidence, he/she can pedal fast and also start negotiating curves and turnarounds. The final lesson would be taking the rider seat as you start off – usually by bending the right leg backward, moving it across and leaping on to the seat, or by moving the right leg over and across the frontal horizontal bar to sit on the seat. Needless to say, bicycles are differently designed for men and women.

 

In those days, hiring of a bicycle for half-an-hour would cost 3 paise and for an hour, it was 5 paise. Even that paltry amount I could manage to get only rarely. The irony was that whenever I took the help of my friend as trainer to enable me learn and practice cycling, he would take the cycle for at least half of the hire-time for himself to enjoy a ‘pleasure-ride’ and only thereafter, he would oblige me with teaching cycling. Sometimes if he was in a good mood, he would take me for a ‘doubles-ride’ during that time; otherwise, he would make me wait till he came back after his quota of joy-ride and then start training me.

Even with the guide aside me and/or after having learnt cycling and starting practicing independently, I might bungle sometimes. Once when I was riding a cycle fast, I ran over a calf. Despite trying my best to apply the brakes (which didn’t oblige me), the mishap occurred. Seeing the incident, the cowherd threateningly chased me. Panicked, I pedalled too fast and fled away from the scene. I heaved a sigh of relief only when I turned back to see him abandoning the chase probably on becoming fatigued. But still all was not over for me. In my anxiety to escape from being captured by the chasing cowherd, I increased my speed to flee fast. My speed became uncontrollable with no failsafe brakes coming to my rescue to stop the cycle somewhere. So, I stopped pedaling at first with the intention of slowing down the cycle and then bringing it to a halt. Even then I couldn’t succeed in what I wanted to due to the traffic-laden road. I was thus in a fix. My maneuvers didn’t succeed and I finally ended up ramming the platform and fell down. I got bruised all over my hands and legs. Thank God, there was neither any fracture in me nor any damage to cycle. Somehow, I managed to limp back to where the cycle remained stranded and took it to the cycle-shop. The cycle-shop owner chided me for being late, because I had overshot the time-frame for which I had hired the cycle. With no money on hand to pay for the extra time, I pleaded with him for allowing me to pay the next day. Being a known person he agreed. Back home, it was too difficult for me to explain away the bruises and injuries I sustained to my parents. It was really a tough time at home, the memories of which still linger on in me. For nearly a month thereafter, I never visited the trouble-spot for fear of being identified for a backlash from the cowherd.

 

In those days, people were happy and comfortable with a bicycle for transport. With advancements and progress taking place, the trail-blazing automated two-wheelers (of course four-wheelers too later) flooding the market rule the roost now.

 

With pollution of sorts precipitating and aggravating the environmental degradation threatening to bring about continued global warming and resultant climate change, and the menace hanging above our heads as a ‘Sword of Damocles’, in order to avoid or at least reduce green house gas emissions contributed by the fuel-driven automobiles, that day is not afar when many people may revert to the bicycle era, the beginning signs of which have already started appearing  with Mexico taking the lead and revisiting the good-old days of cycling. Sooner or later, with the fossil-fuel getting depleted, we might have to go back to traditional environment-friendly means of transport. Widespread environmental awareness among people may inevitably trigger and catapult a new wave trend setting for pollution-free transport in which the robust health-savvy-bicycle might be back to play its pivotal role in the not-too-distant-a-future.

World Bicycle Day is celebrated on June 3 every year.

 

                            

R.SAMPATH

This article was published in the 'Timeout' column of THE INDIAN EXPRESS dated 30.6.2010 with the title 'THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF CYCLING'.