That's money, honey

I've been trying to figure out why I haven't turned out to be a world class athlete yet. After a bit of analysis, the only reasonable conclusion that I could come up with is - sea-level.

See I've lived my life in two sea level cities, Mumbai and Chicago, the lack of rarified mountain air must be the reason for my lack of athletic ability. So now that I'm in Salt Lake City, I have to make up for lost time.

Now you must be wondering that sea level can't just be the only reason and I thought about it as well. Using shoes to run might also be a contributing factor. The Tarahumara Indians (no not from India but from Mexico) are famous for their long distance barefoot running, so maybe I should try that as well.

To ease my transition to barefoot running, I decided to purchase Five Finger's vibram soles.

Now that I have everything planned out, I started for my first run from my base at the base of Wasatch mountain. A few minutes into the run, I'm completely out of breath and the blisters on my foot are getting increasingly painful.



Well my order of two large pizzas must be going cold, so I guess I can wait a few days and try again.

Is reasonableness too much to expect

I've had my views on the gujrat riots, but there seems to be a disquieting trend to silence differing opinions. It recently happened with Anna Hazare who praised development work in Bihar and Gujrat and with Maulana Ghulam Mohammad Vastanvi of Darul Uloom.

The Maulana will probably resign sooner or later, but unfortunately both of them have had to resort to immediate clarification of their intent and statements. Now neither of them have praised Mr. Modi personally or given him a clean chit for his role in the gujrat riots, but it seems that they are now being forced to distance themselves from a position that neither of them took.

Ofcourse its not always the left silencing praise of the right. Mr. Modi's gujrat has gone ahead and banned Joseph Lelyveld's book 'Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India' for its perceived biases.

Different opinions might exist which are completely unrelated to touchy subjects, but is reasonableness of reaction too much to expect from our current 'civil' society...