Sixty Five Minutes...

... and ten kilometers passed in a blur, like the trailer of a movie. It began at Deccan, then flashed past a few celebrities who stood somewhere high up, waving and across the river, up Laxmi Road and thru the core city (somewhere there was a huge hoarding for a film(?),'French Kamasutra') onto Swargate in the morning sunshine and then down MG road and up and over the Garware Flyover and down a stretch of the concreted Bund Garden road which felt painfully long until being told by a cluster of folks who stood by that it was all over and finally a familiar One, waiting...

Thru all those telescoping visuals, a very familiarly distant city felt oddly intimate - roads with near zero traffic, bands at regular intervals playing patriotic songs, kids in school dress waving the tricolor (and several reaching out their hands for a quick pat - this felt electrifying), volunteers manning the 'watering stations' and yes, a huge mass of deep-pink clad strangers who bobbed up and down all around, and then some smoothly gliding past, some trailing off, the steady, heavy pounding of feet on the hard tarred road, the breath increasingly heavy heavy, legs increasingly leaden, shoulders scorched by the sun, eyes burning from sweat...

- Impressions of the Pune International (quarter) Marathon of Nov 26th 2006.