Thursday, October 23, 2008

My nemesis

I deplore parents who treat their children unkindly. In addition to it being cruel, it also results in producing a man who is sadistic, bitter and deeply unhappy. This is a story of one such being. Perhaps if he hadn’t been as starved as he was as a child, he wouldn’t aim to cause so much pain and misery to the scores of innocents whom he claims to help.

This man practices an age old form of discrete torture. The sinister people of his kind meet and discuss various forms of causing the human body intense pain. They also arrived at the conclusion that Man, in general, is a pretty dumb species. The kind that can be tricked into believing that flab is bad, that sushi is fish, and that Yoga is good for you.

Perhaps I should take you through a daily routine to disenchant you from the belief that it makes you fit and flexible. It doesn’t. The term “a pain in the butt” was solely invented for this purpose. Speaking of soles, they can hurt too, by the time he is done with you.

To begin with, he insists that we should begin at an unearthly hour, when the cock is still snoring away. In some parts of the world, you could be beaten to death with a salmon for waking people up at that time of the day. I am currently applying for a visa to that part of the world. It is a mild disadvantage that they also occasionally eat you up, but that is a price I am willing to pay for an extra hour of sleep.

I’ve never been particularly flexible. Fit, yes, but if someone asked me to swing from a bar during the gym period at school, I’d just hang there and wait for someone to let me down again. I was also quite bad at biology since you had to remember complicated names that had too many k’s in them. It is a testimony to my terrible decision making ability that I managed to choose the one form of exercise that requires extreme levels of flexibility as well as a good memory. It takes about fifteen seconds to say the name of a position, and it takes thirty for me since I have to scratch my head and smile benignly till he says it for me.

He then proceeds to make you kick your legs and twist your hips so that you end up in a position that I am quite positive God never meant for you to achieve when he created you. He also smirks several times, and the smirk turns into an obvious grin when your face twitches in pain. Then he asks you to raise your legs and raise your arms and generally resemble such non living items such as a dining table, a chair, a pair of tweezers and the like. He enjoys demonstrating how hopelessly inflexible you are by tucking his legs beneath his arms and rolling around on the carpet, though why someone would consciously want to resemble a bowling ball is beyond me.

The classes are useful in a way. I have realized that even if the exercise isn’t helping me, the sheer threat of blinding pain keeps me away from that plate of fries and that extra helping of rice. Because trust me, nothing is worth the table position.