Saturday, June 28th, 2008
Two months back, I thought of myself as a walker.
I walked for fun. I walked for exercise. I walked to digest my dinner. I walked to clean my head. I walked so that I could watch strangers. I walked so that I could talk with friends.
After I started my experiment and gave up my car, I walked all the time. I tried waking up early so that I could walk from my house in Cuffe Parade to my office in Kala Ghoda before the sun came up. I tried leaving office early so that I could walk over to Marine Drive before the sun went down. I walked to Churchgate station to catch local trains to the suburbs. I walked to New Marine Lines to watch French movies at Alliance Francaise. I met up with friends and dates for a walk on Marine Drive, or Worli Sea Face, or Bandra’s Carter Road, or Juhu’s Chowpatty Beach.
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Also tagged Bombay Hospital, Carter Road, Cuffe Parade, Girgaon Chawpati, IPod, Juhu Chowpatty, Kala Ghoda, Marina Drive, Nike+, Running, Singapore, Vitamin B12, Vitamin D3, Walking, Worli Sea Face
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When I moved into my new house last December, I was delighted. It’s a beautiful house overlooking the sea, walking distance away from office, in the costliest residential address in India. In fact, it’s such a lovely house that it was featured in a Mid-Day story on cool bachelor pads.
It would have been easy for me to look at the house as a symbol of how far I had come in life, especially in the context of where I had started from.
Instead, I remembered this paragraph from page 186 of Po Bronson’s life-changing book What Should I Do with My Life?, in which “boom wrangler” Heidi Olson explains her wanderlust —
I decided to go to Oxford for a year, because, well, it was Oxford. I told the other women at work, and one said, ‘I wish I could just up and go to Oxford.’ So I asked, ‘Why don’t you?’ She said, ‘I would, but I bought a couch.’ I always remembered that moment, and I never wanted to be that woman. I never wanted to be trapped by my past, my belongings, my commitments.
While men may get a thrill from the experience of paying, women love the experience of shopping itself. Paco Underhill explains why on page 116-117 of ‘Why We Buy‘ —
For many women, there are psychological and emotional aspects to shopping that are just plain absent in most men. Women can go into a kind of reverie when they shop — they become absorbed in the ritual of seeking and comparing, of imagining and envisioning merchandise in use. They then coolly tally up the pros and the cons of this purchase over that, and once they’ve found what they want at the proper price, they buy it. Women generally care that they do well in even the smallest act of purchasing, and they take pride in their ability to select the perfect thing, whether it’s a cantaloupe or a house or a husband.
Not that there’s anything superficial about the female relationship with consumption. In fact, it’s women, not men, who plumb the metaphysics of shopping — they illuminate how we human beings go through life searching, examining, questioning, and then acquiring and assuming and absorbing the best of what we see. At that exalted level, shopping is a transforming experience, a method of becoming a newer, perhaps even slightly improved person. The products you buy turn you into that other, idealized version of yourself: that dress makes you beautiful, this lipstick makes you kissable, that lamp turns your house into an elegant showplace.