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Lifelong affair with the bicycle
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Viswanathan has a yen for bicycles. Buses and other vehicles bore him. He has stuck to his bicycle for nearly thirty years now. He tells K. PRADEEP about his love for this two-wheeler.
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THE CITY roads, bursting at its seams with its burgeoning traffic, do not seem to bother this man. T.P.Viswanathan pedals on quietly, in measured pace, oblivious of the ruckus around him. He has done that, everyday, for the past three decades, to the office, to his friends' houses, to the market, to everywhere.
Unlike many, Viswanathan never graduated from that youngster's passion for the bicycle. Of course he, perhaps persuaded by his wife and daughter, had a brief fling with a moped, which he ended when he found the machine "uncomfortable."
There is something in being perched on the bicycle and pedalling away with the breeze, dust and noise around. For Viswanathan, going long distances on his faithful bicycle is what he enjoys most. Even when inter-departmental transfers took him kilometres away from his hometown of Tripunithura, Viswanathan chose to pedal his way to the office and back everyday. "For nearly two years I was posted at Koothattukulam. It was the only time that I commuted to the office by bus. It was horrible waiting for the buses, hanging on in the crowd till you got a seat," says Viswanathan, who is now posted as Clerk Attender at the Sales Tax Appellate Tribunal, Kochi.
Apart from his regular trips to his office or to Udayanapuram, where his wife Geeta works, Viswanathan's cycling expeditions have taken him as far as Guruvayur. "I have never felt it tiring at all. If you can maintain a steady speed, enough to cover 10 kilometres in an hour, long distance cycling will not be tiring at all. It usually takes me around 12 hours to reach Guruvayur and approximately 75 minutes from my home to Ernakulam. Of course I prefer using the by lanes, what with the unruly traffic on the Kochi roads!"
More than his strange preference for the bicycle, there appears a streak of daring in this man. Viswanathan loves to do things differently. When one of his friends asked him if he could list out the words prefixed with `ology,' Viswanathan spent days poring over various dictionaries and coming out with nearly 450 entries. He also copied down to paper a whole edition of an English-Malayalam dictionary, every entry, an effort that took him nearly six years.
It is that spirit of adventure that spurs him every year to walk all the way to Sabarimala. "I have been doing this right from 1978. All my friends who accompanied me for the first couple of years have stopped doing so. But I still go, taking a short cut road that leads to Erumely."
When he is not on the bicycle Viswanathan takes time to browse through the fairly good collection of books he has been able to build up through these years. Among those shelves of books are some rare ones like the 1940 edition of the life history of Fr. Jose Vakayil and the earliest published edition of Kunjan Nambiar's thullal kathakal. "I'm fascinated by history and the biographies and autobiographies. I have a lot of such books, but very few novels. I make it a point to keep adding to my collection every year through the many book schemes initiated by the various publishing houses."
Viswanathan also has a collection of stamps and currency notes, which, he says, he has not been able to concentrate on of late. He hopes his daughter Remya would pursue this hobby seriously.
Nearly 29 years back, Viswanathan remembers how he dusted and cleaned his bicycle that morning, pedalling confidently to his first day in office. Three years from now, he will retire from service. Five cycles have come and gone from his life. And his only wish is to leave office for the last time on his cycle, an end to a long, regular, enjoyable affair.
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Thiruvananthapuram
Visakhapatnam
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