No one wants to be fat, no one! But, and this makes me sad to say, I am putting on weight (after looking at me in my present state, my friends, too, have said that to me). My belly is growing bigger. It is not beer which should be held accountable for it. I have stopped drinking beer a long time back (but, let me also inform you, when I say ‘a long time back’ I mean it has been a month). And, no, it is not even the junk food; I avoid all kinds of junk food (burger, vada pav, and what have you, to hell with them!). Lately, on the basis of one of my colleagues’ suggestion, I have started drinking green tea (it works wonders he claimed and I, the fool, believed). All this, no matter what merit they may have, don’t seem to work for me. Hence, like many of my friends, I decided I would join a gym. But after hearing what my parents had to say about me joining a gym, I decided not to join any gym ever.

My mother asked: “Gym? But what is gym?”

I tried to explain what a gym means and what people do in a gym.

My father, being a business-minded person that he is, asked, “Well, then, how much will you get paid for it?”

I told him that it is I who has to pay instead. Hearing this my father heaved a sigh of disappointment. “I grew up doing hard work,” he said in a very serious tone, “but never have I taken the pain of lifting someone else’s load.” He looked at my mother who also seemed to be of the same opinion as him. “And,” my father continued, “if at all I ever did that, I got paid, not that I paid for it!”

Perhaps I can find a better way to be in shape than lifting someone else’s load. I suppose running would help, but I fear what my parents would have to say about that. Would they say: “What are you running from?” or “What/Who are you running after?” And then, I wonder, would they also add: “We never ran from or after anybody or anything.”

Copyright © 2017 RAMU DAS