The Maiden Metric Century Ride
Story of my first 100km cycling experience.
“The best rides are the ones where you bite off much more than you can chew, and live through it - Doug Bradbury”
The quote beautifully summarises my complete experience of cycling from my hometown, Kochi a bustling city in Kerala to the quite and beautiful Marari Beach and back, for my first metric century ride. It all started off in early August, from one of those typical covid era’s lethargic days. I was wasting my time scrolling through random reels, youtube shorts and satisfying my curiosity asking Google about extremely weird and random questions I had on a wide array of topics from trivial day to day life to mind-boggling conspiracy theories. (We will talk about it in maybe some other post.) In the process I found myself reading some old news article about a bunch of cycling enthusiasts completing around 600kms of the ride here in Kerala. The sheer amount of kilometres they logged in ignited my curiosity about pursuing long cycling tours and added a word to which I was pretty unfamiliar till then to my vocabulary, ‘Randonneuring’. Little did I know that this random news snippet was going to change my life forever, opening up a new chapter in my life.
Dharma and the Moral Dilemma of Life
A brief take by the millennial on the concept of dharma and moral dilemma in life, through several instances from great Indian epics.
Introduction
Dharma one of the four purusharthas forms the heart of Indian philosophy and is an untranslatable expression. It encompasses a wide variety of connotations ranging from duty, justice, law, goodness, morality, and even customs. The word is a derivative of the Sanskrit root dhr which means ’to sustain’. It can be viewed as the balance in one’s self and in ones surrounding based on moral law and duties that sustains the social order, universe, and even the individual. Does this conceptually complex idea of dharma help in enlightening the human mind and relieving it from the continuous inflow of doubts and questions? Does dharma help us out of the moral dilemmas we face in this quixotic world due to our inherent ignorance and vulnerable nature? Does staunch commitment to dharma alleviate us from the misery of birth and of being alive? Thoughts such as these drive us to explore more on the meaning of dharma and its effect on our life.