WAY TO GO...
(PART I)
The house that I stay in (well, I don't feel like calling it my home as yet) is
about a kilometer away from my office, and I cycle to office everyday. The cycle
was the first thing that I bought after coming to Bangalore, when I discovered
that my office was about a kilometer away from the house.

I couldn't think of buying a bike instead. Number one, the cost. I had made up
my mind, not to take any more money from my parents, now that I was working.
More importantly, my mother would have had a heart attack, had she heard that I
was going to buy a bike! And I was still an obidient son, fresh from college!

So I bought a cycle within a couple of weeks of coming to Bangalore. I was not
an expert cyclist (I still am not). My cousins in Kalyani (a small town in West
Bengal) dreaded the idea of allowing me to ride their bicycles. They couldn't
say an outright NO when I asked for the cycle, but they made it a point, never
to be within a mile of me with a cycle!

My parents had bought me a cycle when I was in class eight.It was a parallel bar
affair, and the idea was that my younger sister and I will share it (take turns
in riding). And since we were never allowed outside the gates of our building,
there was never hot contention to aquire the rights to ride on any particular
day. My cycling career while in school comprised of going up and down the stony
road in front of our building and within its walls, chequered with innumerable
falls, a constantly bruised pair of knees and the delight of the local pharmacy
giving anti-tetanus injections.