JOY RIDES IN CITIES COME ON PEDDLED WHEELS

Cycling gets heaped with hefty praise for the benefits it gives — great for cardio, eco-friendly, sporty, perfect for bonding activities, easy to explore on, green chic on wheels. More than what it’s lean frame can carry. Perhaps this reverence that many urban dwellers have for this little ride stems from fond childhood memories. Recall ads and movies where shiny, basket-attached, red bicycles were being gifted to ecstatic kids?

We cycled for play and then we grew up. For some the town around them grew up and became a crazy city like, hmmm, Bangalore. And this humble ride couldn’t make the transition from a play thing to a real thing. 

Cycling belonged to childhood for me. Growing up in Bombay, we spent our annual winter holidays in Deolali, a small cantonment town near Nasik. For that one month, I’d experience the joy of small town living that I had only known in the pages of Enid Blyton. Places where cycles were an actual mode of transportation, not joy rides. (Bombay did have people running errands on bicycles but that was for adults only.)

I learnt bicycling in Deolali and rode around in the compound for fun and nearby places on errands or to visit places. On those roads, exempt from heavy traffic, it was safe for kids to go exploring on cycles. 

But that was decades ago. Three years back, I yearned to get back behind the handle. It’s often said for abandoned skills that picking them up again is like riding a cycle — you never forget. I thought let’s give the actual and the metaphorical a peddle.  

The passing decades could be challenging. Not only was I older, the city of Bangalore was not exactly a town. Friends recalled cycling to school but qualified it by sighs of “those where the days.” (Those days I was in Bombay taking a prosaic school bus.) But I did spot cycling enthusiasts on present Bangalore roads, amidst the traffic, oblivious of vehicles and fumes, donning cool cycle helmets. And I was besotted. 

When there’s a wish there’s a way somewhere. I got the chance to spend some ten days in Kodaikanal. Every morning I’d rent a bicycle and pedal away around the lake. I did venture on the streets but the steep inclines made it difficult.

I was back on wheels. 

I returned to Bangalore and took to the road. A few tentative rounds in the area I live (which is still blessed with by-lanes, has light traffic, and is coincidentally called cantonment). And one fine day, as they say, I was ready: helmet, backpack, and all — ridding out into the world picking up groceries, saving the ecosystem, and, hopefully, dropping off a few pounds.