hmmm!!

Today, I have no idea what I want to write, these days, almost every weekend I try to think what I will want to blog on. This time around, however, I am just waiting for Monday.

Almost, every Monday, I sing "It's just another manic Monday; I wish it was Sunday; 'Cause that's my funday".

But this time, it is gonna be different, I am so waiting for this Monday. Something, that I dreamed of is coming true. In principle, I have been saving 30$ per month for this since last August. Even though, I never did put this money separately in a box, I was calculating how much I owe to myself for this.

I am getting my own bicycle; a road bike, Motobecane Grand Record. :D UPS is supposed to make a delivery before the end of the day, Monday, it it going to be a long day!

The concept of "my own bicycle" is not new for me, I had one when I was in high school. How I bought this bike a nice little story in itself; the bike that I ended up buying was a great one too; the Hero Ranger Swing; dual shocks MTB with 3x5 (yes that equals 15 :P ) gears. I think I did a fair amount of biking on it. Here is a picture.

Hero Ranger Swing; not mine. A result of a Google image search;
see http://www.gumtree.com/

I thought I had some digital pictures of my bike, surprisingly I don't have any! Anyway, this bike served me well for about 3 years, 10th to 12th standard (grade). When I joined engineering in Bangalore, I always wanted to take my bike to BLR (in principle) and just when I mentioned it to my dad that I would take it one particular time, he told me he had sold it. That bike had costed my all my childhood savings plus interest from bank. 

Yes, I opened my first bank account when I was in 4th standard (grade). In that particular year, Vijaya Bank had just opened a new branch just outside my school and I was perhaps the first one to have a minor account in that branch. Now, if I think about it, I did everything from getting the application form to making the first deposit of 100 Rs or so. I think, I was in 6 standard when I decided that I was not earning enough interest on my savings account (I think it was 4% and it still is 4%). I then put the money I had in this savings account, a little over 2000Rs, in a private financial institute called ICDS, a financial services company then owned by the Manipal Group. They promised to double that money in 50 months or so and I think they even gave me an umbrella to go to school. 

And I used that 4000 Rs in 10th Standard to buy my bike and I "downgraded" from umbrella to raincoat again! To be honest, it had gotten a little fancier by then, we would called it jerkin (Google thinks jerkin is a sleeveless jacket, but I used it as a all-weather jacket). But I never wore waterproof pants with my jerkin, and would rather sit with wet pants in the class than to bother myself with one. By the way, if you do not know where I am from, it is the west coast of India where it doesn't rain but pours! Be assured, my shirt was equally wet in the rain, so were my books!

Anyway, those were fun days. The rain never stopped us from riding Saturday afternoons on the edges of the paddy fields, the streams from flooded rivers never stopped us from fishing in them or sending paper boats. In these murky waters we would find mostly tadpoles and sometimes some lovely looking very small fishes. After that, these fishes lived in cleaned incandescent bulbs and fluorescent lights, for a few days, :(

Now, back to the Motobecane story, I rode a few hours today in cold chilly rain and small head wind. I guess I rode about 10-15 miles and I started to think if I was really enjoying it. Enjoying like I did when I rode to my favorite ice-cream store, when I rode to my best friends house, when I rode with my friend sitting on the carrier in the back, kilometers of distance at times to play a day full of cricket matches and back after the game. 

There was this one time, when I rode to the service center in Udupi (Anthony Cycles) a distance of 13km each way with a broken pedal! The pedal had worn out and I put a stick in the crank shaft instead of the pedal. It was a nightmare!

I guess I will never enjoy like that, there will always be something at the back of my head; some unimportant unnecessary silly little thing, may be that my new bike needs an upgrade!

PS:

1. If it interests you, you may read the specs of my bike here http://www.motobecane.com/alplus/grr.html