Looks like there are fewer bicycles on the roads than was the case some years ago: this is an unhealthy sign

What with an old interview with the current Union Minister for Tourism and Culture doing the rounds on Facebook, wherein he states he is off to buy bicycles for his son and himself as petrol prices had skyrocketed during the period of the earlier government, and the rather baffling reason he has now given for the steep rise in the price of motor fuel, I thought I might as well dust up my old bicycle and get it back on the road and going. And with that came nostalgia, nostalgia for all things less motorised and relatively simple.

When I graduated to my eighth birthday, my father thought it fit to teach me, his little daughter, the rudiments of the art of cycling. I call it an art, because unlike riding a motorcycle where you sit stiffly, on a bicycle you have to move your body in a smooth, rhythmic motion that is in tandem with the pedals of the contraption to get you moving forward. The bicycles of the past were strongmen such as Hercules and Atlas. None of the fancy coloured and delicate three-wheeled cycles that children as young as three are routinely gifted today, then for us. Parents those days, even if they could afford it, thought sensibly and only rented a bicycle to teach their children cycling.

We went to the local cycle rental shop and got small baby cycles, as they were called then, for a princely sum of 50 paise an hour. And these baby cycles had sturdy and solid metal bodies that had some paint peeled off, from the many rough tumbles of shaky first-time learners. An hour every weekend was devoted to learning the art of bicycle balancing on empty roads.

I still remember the reassuring hand of my father on the seat of the bicycle as he ran alongside, guiding me through the basics of getting the handle go where I wanted the cycle to go, and at the same time balancing myself on the moving body of metal without crashing. Despite his guarding presence during those initial days of teaching and learning, I managed to fall and scrape my elbows and knees. Despite the tears and bruised limbs, we were always back the next weekend for my lessons. And the first time my father took away his reassuring hand and let me go on on my own, was both terrifying and exhilarating. I quickly mastered the now seemingly easy act of cycling and soon started monkey pedalling through the bars of the gents’ bicycle before I mustered the courage to cross over and sit astride my father’s bottle-green cycle.

Riding mother’s ladies’ cycle was another experience. The ladies’ cycle seemed unnaturally high for a diminutive child of eight, and after a few nasty falls that injured me and dented the cycle, I was barred from riding it. I finally got my own girl’s cycle, a lot smaller than my mother’s cycle, and rode it through school and college. I never thought anything about cycling some 4 km a day.

And I sometimes carried additional weight in the form of friends who rode pillion, ‘doubles’ as it was called. And if the going became an uphill task at panting, we both just hopped down and walked our way.

But the cycle is slowly on its way out in these parts, it appears. Fewer and fewer homes have bicycles today and even a town like Puducherry that boasted of a large number of bicycles has comparatively fewer cyclists on the roads today, though fuel prices are fuelling skyward! Cycling would benefit the health of the individual and that of the nation that is coughing unhealthily.

sherry.bindu@gmail.com