Our Friend Ravi brings a message for Green Fitness

Brian Thompson on May 25th, 2009

Some months back I started working at a club, The Mumbai Cricket Association Recreation Centre (we Indians are a bit heavy on cricket), nice place, good sports facilities,gym, pool, restaurants, bar etc. The place is good, working here is enjoyable and I am able to do things I enjoy. Here the relevance of your philosophy is starkly visible, if fitness is the aim then expensive gyms are not the answer. Generally speaking, the scale of fitness is inversely proportional to the cost of the equipment in use. We have the most expensive equipment, and barring a few exceptions, the most unfit members. Fitness is the way the body functions under varying conditions. The bodies I have the pleasure of seeing, just don’t function.

When we were kids we played a game Jhad Bandar, Jhad means tree and Bandar means monkey, so the game was monkeys on trees. We would climb trees and there was a den who had to catch us, today we have no trees and kids are too busy watching TV or killing each other on computers. At the pool we usually played catching, in which the den was on one side of the pool and the rest of us on the other, all we did was to dive from one side of the pool and get out at the other. The sheer fun and exertion in such sport cannot be defined. There was no money or equipment, we were one with nature, after such games we were all scratched and bruised but healthy and happy. Those days there was only the odd fat boy or girl in school, today the opposite is the case.
My parents did not possess a car, we only moved by bicycle or on foot. We never had a car and we never missed one. Those days were bliss, one had never heard the words pollution or calories. As army cadets we were scaled 5,000 calories per day. For us it was an irrelevant figure, all it meant was unlimited quantities of food. We were forever famished and when we met old aunts, they only remarked about us not getting enough to eat.

I am horrified when I hear kids talking of obesity and diet charts, youngsters suffering from diabetes and high BP. Boys becoming fathers and girls pregnant at 12. Have we not gone terribly wrong, this mad race where is it leading us? These presidents and prime ministers, pumping in trillions of dollars only to perpetuate a sick system. This recession, is someone telling us something that we are refusing to hear. Should we not sit down, consider sharing what we already have instead of digging in for more. We humans have survived with God’s creation for thousands of years, why are we bent on destroying it in 50. In the year 1900, India had 40,000 tigers and the ecosystem to support them, now we celebrate when they breed in a zoo.

Green Fitness World has a message the potential of which needs to be explored.