Happy 60th, India!

Well, the land of my birth is sixty years old, enfin! Only twenty years younger than her (there, I gave my age away, not that it was much of a secret), I have seen her through socialist self-restraint and hyper-capitalist excess. K. tells me that things were pretty restrained here in the U.S. too till the eighties when the culture of consumption gripped every sphere of life, from clothes, to cars to houses to education. According to K., my one-person resource on things American, the culture of malls, etc., was pretty alien to him till his late teens. Now of course, that is all there is here. Except small, boutique-y bouts of defiance, like the farmers' markets held in different small towns in Fairfield County.

To me, not being much of a shopper (except for used books, but that's a different story), the biggest difference between my Indian childhood and my American middle age is my use of the bicycle. Growing up in small army cantonments (or bases as they say here), my bike was my chief mode of transportation - to school, to dance lessons, to friend's houses. Grown men and women biked to work, the milkman balanced a precarious load of cans full of milk on his rear wheel, soldiers and officers rode bikes to the parade ground and to the lines, stiffening their arms and straightening up whenever a flag car approached them. Here in Fairfield County, as I bike around the neighborhood behind S., keeping an eye on his wobbly forward movements, I realize that my bike is now my chief mode of recreation. And that's the way it will stay, unless K.'s prophecy of impending energy crisis comes true in the near future. In which case, I guess I will be hauling loads of groceries back on my bike like this unknown.

Anyway, happy 60th India, here's to many more! As for you, Hero Cycle of my childhood, I have more ambivalent feelings towards you. Not sure that your gears were up to scratch, given the tumble I took on the second day of my ownership of a brand new bike.