Walking
Wednesday November 3 2004 09:02 IST
By Karmayogi
Walking is an essential
activity. Incidentally, it is an excellent exercise as it strains most of the
muscles in the body to some extent. People in the village walking ten miles was
common in those days.
Even when there is a bus service, some people would prefer to walk. E.I.D.
Parry & Co. has several legends in its long history. One such was that the
most important cane farmer in the seventies was one who walked 19 miles from
his village without taking the bus or train in order to save 18 np. The journey
is 38 miles up and down.
Today it is unthinkable. Members of the present generation find their feet
swelling when they sit in one place for several hours continuously. The habit
of walking is less, as they ride a vehicle, use lifts and do sedentary jobs. After
fixing a measuring device at the hip and connecting it to the shoes, it was
calculated that a housewife walks eight miles a day. Walking has been decorated
as 'constitutional' when undertaken for health.
Going around a 300 acre farm is to walk four or five miles. It would be the
smallest of farms in a country like USA, where farms are of 10,000 acres or
600,000 acres.
There was a time when one walked all over such farms in the course of work. Wordsworth,
his sister Dorothy and Coleridge began a Scottish tour on foot. Coleridge
branched off by himself at Stirling and continued for nearly 300 miles
until there was nothing left of his shoes.
In the nineteenth century in Europe, a walk of twenty miles was nothing. Sarah,
the first wife of the English poet Hazlitt walked a total distance of 200 miles
to visit places of interest. Captain Berkeley Allordice (1779-1854) was noted
for 'pedestrian feats'.
In 1807 he did 87 miles on hilly roads in fourteen hours. The next year he
started at 5 am, walked thirty miles for grouse shooting, dined at
5 pm
and walked sixty miles to his house at Ury in eleven hours; after attending to
business, he walked 16 miles to Laurence Kirk, danced at a ball, returned to Ury
by 7 am and spent the next day partridge shooting.
The next year at New Market, he walked a thousand miles in a specified time for
a bet of 2100. As similar records are not available in our country, we do not
now who did what. What appears to us as impossible or a feat was, in those days
of no transport, a routine affair all over the world. Imagine an illiterate or a
neo-literate who reads a sentence in five minutes observing a person reading
thirty pages in one hour or even sixty pages.
Each period makes commonplace what was a wonder and a rarity in the previous
century. Man's energies and resources are infinite.
He can achieve anything on which he sets his Mind, provided it is already an
achievement of the society. It is unthinkable for us to conceive of hundreds of
geniuses in the future. It will be real when the society fixes its mind on it.