Reminiscences

XIII

My Athletics

There is in the Upanishad a description of the stage in man's life when he becomes so old and decrepit that he cannot walk except on a stick, tvam jīrno dandena vaācasi. At precisely that stage in our life, we in the Ashram received a call to plunge into the activities of our Playground. I was then perhaps the oldest among the inmates, and had long passed the fifty-year limit once set by the ancients for repairing to the forest, pañcāsordhe vanam vrajet; I was in fact in my early sixties.

For at least twenty years previous to that, we had been taking it rather easy and were doing very little physical work or exercise. That had been what might be described as a period of inner preparation, a time devoted almost entirely to meditation and study. Lest however I should lose all elasticity of body, I had been making use of two opportunities for some kind of exercise. One was to ride on a bicycle once a week to the local French Post Office and back. The Mother used to receive her foreign mail in those days through that Post Office, and on me had devolved the task of bringing in the mail. That incidentally was how I got my famous headgear: it came in connection with this particular item of work. During summer, the hot summer months of Pondicherry, I had to go to the Post Office in the blazing sun. It was quite a distance in those days and I felt I needed some kind of protection for my skull. I struck upon a device. The mail had to be carried in bags, one or two white canvas bags. I folded them up in two and put them on my head, the two corners of the bags sticking out on either side like a pair of horns. This gave the children of the local school an occasion for a hearty laugh one day: "Quel bonnet! quel bonnet!"—"What a cap! what a cap!" they cried. When I mentioned this to the Mother, she said, "All right, we shall see." We had a French lady, called in the Ashram by the name of Sarala, staying with us here at "Belle Vue", with her husband who was known as Shuchi. Shuchi died later and was buried in the public cemetery in Pondicherry.

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This Sarala was asked to devise something for my head. It was she who designed my skull-cap which has since been the inspiration for many a subsequent imitation.

Let me in this connection tell you another amusing story. One day there came to the Post Office a packet addressed to the Mother from Japan. It was war time and the rules were very strict, lest any kind of undesirable matter should find entry. One of the Post Office employees, a Frenchman, opened the packet in my presence. He found in it nothing else except a single sheet of paper with something on it that looked like a sketch—-just the branch of a tree. The official handed me the paper with obvious disappointment, adding his comment, "Une branche quelconque"—"some sort of a branch!" The "branche" happened to be a fine piece of Japanese painting. But who would appreciate that? Not in any case a detective of the Post Office. I mentioned the incident to Sri Aurobindo. He could never forget the story; at the slightest opportunity he would come out with that "une branche quelconque".

Now to come back to the point. I was speaking of the kind of exercise I had in those days, that medieval period of our existence, perhaps you would call it. The second item in my physical education programme was still more impressive. It consisted in giving a very careful wash to my clothes when I took my bath. This allowed some exercise to the limbs and body and I considered this as the minimum needed for keeping up the physical tone; it did duty for push-ups and dumbbells and everything else. I should add another item: that was walking, a kind of morning walk. Early in the morning every day I used to go out and deliver to the sadhaks the letters written to them by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. In those days, of course, the Ashram houses were not so many and not so far apart, so it was not exactly a 1500 or 5000 metre walking race.

I have told you, we received the call to join the Playground activities. I was enlisted in the Blue group. In those days it was the Mother who decided who would go to which group;

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in any case it was done with her knowledge and approval. Udar was our captain. We started learning the steps, "Un, deux, un, deux". Ages ago, I had done some military marching with the Volunteer Corps, but that was only for a, few days. I remember how in that enthusiasm for everything Swadeshi, they had started giving the marching orders in Bengali: "Turn to the left", "Turn to the right", "Drop out" (in place of "Dismiss" or "Rompez vos rangs")!

I had to start on this new athletic career without any preliminary practice or training. Many of you may recall how we joined in our first competitive tournament, on the site along the sea-face where the Tennis grounds stand— they had not yet been built. I had no knowledge of the special technique, there was no warming up or anything. We just walked in and took our positions along the starting line, and off we went as soon as the whistle blew. We simply ran for our lives, with the result that I sprained a thigh muscle in my first run. Luckily, this happened near the goal, so I could finish the race. The results were not bad: I shared the second place with Pavitra and Yogananda—the first position went to someone, a sannyasin who is no longer with us. I took part in the long jump in the same manner, without any previous practice or warming up. Some people advised me to do a little preliminary training, but I was obliged to reply, "My sole events in the course of a whole year are a single race and three jumps. They do not deserve more." This is the opening chapter in my new career of athletics.

At that time I had not the faintest notion that one day I would develop into a regular athlete, that is to say, undergo all kinds of training and exercise. I told you once about the difference between the physical training activities here and the way we used to set about them in our time. This is an age of science and those were the days of untrained skill. Let me illustrate from an experience I had in football. We never observed the rule that a proper warming up is needed before one joins the game. We entered the field straightway, and it has happened several times that after the first long run at the beginning of the game I felt absolutely worn out and wondered

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how on earth I was going to last through the game. Of course, everything was all right after a while and the body received a new influx of energy as it got warmed up—we used to call it "heating up the blood". Today, the first and most important principle of any kind of game or other exercise is "training", a detailed and minute training. Formerly, one could pass off as a master by simply mastering the rules of the game. This applied not only to games like cricket or football; even in our own native wrestling and lathi-play, "training" meant nothing more than getting acquainted with all the tricks and applying them correctly in practice. But that is not what is now meant by "training". "Training" implies a special preparation of the body, making it apt for a special kind of activity. First of all, one has to acquire a general all-round physical fitness. Next, one has to find out which particular parts of the body and which of the muscles are specially called into action in any particular movement and these have to be specially trained with a view to give them the necessary strength, endurance and skill, exactly like a material instrument, as if they were bits of dead matter. In whatever activity you wish to specialise, for specialisation seems to be the aim of physical culture today, you have to prepare yourself for it; the preparation itself becomes the main objective, the end in view is relegated to the second position. You take part in a 100 metre race, actually a matter of a few seconds only. But in order to prepare for the race, you have to train for several hours every day, for days on end over a period of months and perhaps years.

Formerly, the entire emphasis was on the game itself, not so much on the person who played the game; it used to be said that it was the game that made the player. But now the scales have turned the other way: the player has become the main interest. The concentration is on the player himself and his training is the main thing. He has first of all to build up the body, next his vital forces, and finally even his mind and will power have to be geared to the end in view; the inner psychological factors are taken particularly into account today.

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In science too the same thing is noticeable, even in the study of physical science. Formerly, the whole effort of science lay in discovering and establishing the existence of the separate, self-existing and independent, elements in Nature and in finding out the mechanism of their action through the methods of observation and experiment. Now it is being said, observation and experiment are all right so far as they go, but at the same time one cannot ignore the person who makes the observation and experiment; he too has an importance, perhaps a prime importance.

To a certain extent, I too have gone through this phase of modern "training", as you all know. I have given up the old methods of learning by rule-of-thumb and have tried to acquire some kind of proficiency through a process of regular training, following in the footsteps of many among yourselves, although I may not have been able to tread the lines of our Madanlal. His theory seems to be that the more effort you put in the greater becomes your skill or ability and that there is no game on earth that you cannot master by sheer dint of hard work. Madanlal himself is a living proof of his doctrine, for he is without a rival in this method of hard painstaking practice. There are, as you know, two main types among those who do well in studies or—shall we say? —there are two ways of becoming a good student. There are those who, gifted with natural intelligence and ability, waste the whole year in all sorts of extra-curricular activities and in pleasures and pastimes and then read up for days and nights for a month or two just before the examination and get through the test and even secure high places. There is the second type who read and work hard throughout the whole year, devote some time every day to their studies, and never run the risk of falling ill or having a nervous breakdown about the time of the examination on account of excessive work. Our Madanlal belongs to this second category. He is really out to prove by his own example that definition of genius which makes it nothing but the capacity for taking infinite pains.I have to mention another name in this connection.

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For much of what I have now achieved in the field of athletics I owe a deep debt to our Chinmoy. He has been my coach. What have I learnt from him? It is enthusiasm. What do I mean by enthusiasm? I shall explain. One of the secrets of physical training is that you must always try to perform a little more than your capacity, or what you may think is the limit of your powers. Perhaps it was with this end in view that in our time when one had to exercise a particular part of the body, the instructions were to go on repeating the movement until one began to sweat and felt exhausted. For how long am I to manipulate the dumb-bells or the Indian clubs? Until you are tired, the chart said, that is, until you felt you could do no more. Now of course, nothing is done by such haphazard guesswork. You have to repeat the movements for a certain definite number of times, by actual count, say, five or six repetitions for the first day, to be increased by one or two every day or every week, a final limit being set in respect of each individual according to his capacity. This is the method of scientific training today.

Whatever the method you adopt, your strength and capacity have to be increased in this manner. If you go beyond your limits, there is always a chance of accidents, but you accept the risk. The carefree enthusiast asks you to hitch your wagon to a star whereas the more cautious would point to the tragedy of Icarus. The legendary hero of Greek mythology had invented wings for man to fly, but he built them of wax. His aim had been to reach the sun, but as he came near that burning orb the wax got melted by the heat and his wings vanished and he was hurled back headlong down to earth.

Well, it was from Chinmoy that I got the courage or the fool hardiness for an attempt of this kind. This has been of great help to me. But there was a considerable resistance born of old age, even though we are here precisely to get rid of that. The resistance comes from two sources. It is there first of all in your own individual consciousness; you have heard of the adage about getting old before twenty. It is true that here in the Ashram we are often apt to forget, or

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we try to forget, to take count of our age. For example, even at the age of sixty, I did not quite realise or, rather, my body did not feel—it is quite natural for the mind not to feel, but the body itself must realise—that it carried any load of ignore than twenty-five or thirty years. This kind of feeling must have come at one time or another to many among the older people here. This is indeed the root idea behind our desire to conceal the true age and reckon our age at less than the true figure. This recourse to a slight falsehood comes of an attempt to express and maintain the fact of our youth that is still effective in our life and inner consciousness in spite of our years. But the inexorable law of the external physical nature is still in operation. It invades our mind and pains it at times. Moreover, in addition to this resistance in our own individual consciousness or frame of mind, there is pressing upon us from all around the collective resistance, a resistance that comes from the consciousness and mental attitude of everybody else, the neighbours with whom we live. Even if we manage to forget, they will remind us of the pressure of advancing age. It is difficult ordinarily to escape from the influence of this double pressure. But to get rid of this influence and pressure is after all the very aim of our endeavour here.

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