The early morning Jog

Its morning , im jogging ... its taken some time to get adjusted to life here in a new city - Mumbai ... everything about this life/new job is so different ... My interests/activities has also changed a lot over the years , sometimes I wonder if i have changed totally as a person as i hardly feel a connect with the kind of life i was leading a few years back ... earlier i used to read a lot after getting back from work ... these days im always online chatting/reading blogs , watching movies/TV series on laptop ... for sometime i thought there was no connect with the life i used to lead and i had moved into some other dimension altogether like in the plots of some of my favourite Superhero cartoons or like Neo at start of Matrix Revolutions. That was until i started my early morning jog ...
These days i go for a jog in the morning in a park nearby and mostly i am all alone early in the morning and while running alone my thoughts get sucked into a nostalgic whirlpool , my mind wanders off into the past ... My memory jogs back to the days when two young lads in Coimbatore had finished their engineering college and decided that they needed some exercise as months of sitting at home and awaiting for joining letter/job was taking its toll .. the Two of us used to go to a huge ground/stadium in an University near our place ... we used to jog in the athletics track in the stadium which was empty during summer ... i can still vividly remember the cry of peacocks and sights of the hills in the backdrop of the stadium , athletes training in one corner , while we do the rounds cracking occasional jokes , discussing cricket sitting in the shade of a tree after jogging ... i keep running while looking at my watch , there is still no one here in this park today.
Its early morning in Bangalore and 2 super energetic roomies drag their thin roomie out of bed and i reluctantly trudge along and we go for morning jog in the parks of JP Nagar ... the air is so fresh and pure , the place is full of people doing exercise, jogging , oldies out for a walk and catching up with old friends in park benches , laughter therapy sessions ... the place is so full of energy and activity early in the morning as i keep running trying to catch up with my roomies ... Occasionally a sound of Lorry passing by or car honking reminds me that im still jogging alone here in this park , i look at the time just 10 mins up ... i spot an old man wearing t-shirt and formal trousers with sports shoe doing brisk walk ... i keep running
Three of us at office decide to hit the gym and all of us being lazy bones - we call each other early in the morning over phone to ensure we all turn up in the gym and we ensure that the one who misses gym is taunted the whole day . Its morning at Infy Bangalore and three friends are running on the treadmill ... we trade an occasional joke in the middle of it and pass comments on the latest chick to hit the gym , we compare notes on the exercises we are gonna perform that day and how much of 'muscle building' has happened ... i keep running the sun has come up and its getting really sweaty , even mornings in Mumbai are hot ! no wonder there are only a few people in this park ... I keep running its been 20 mins , there is a strange sound somewhere nearby , i stretch my arms ...
The two young lads are again running in Coimbatore in the same picturesque university ground ... they are back jogging together here after 5 long years , but little seems to have changed , the track looks the same , there are athletes practicing in a corner, the peacocks are still abundant , the lads still share the same camaraderie , crack the same old jokes ,talk about the same old stuff and run ... I slow down , the hot Mumbai sun has emerged and is making its presence felt, im sweating a lot , again i hear a strange sound ,look around don't see anything , i stretch my arms .
I start slowing down and shift to brisk walking , the well paved concrete path in the part that im running on seems so familiar , as i walk around the park , my thoughts deposit me somewhere esle , the scenery changes , im wading through the neat concrete pavement however around me there are blocks of similar looking apartments ... its hot and i continue walking the scenery has changed im a road which seems to be placed in Shire and not in this world , its so green and there is grass all around on one side of the road is a slope full of grass leading to dense growth of trees and on the other side and huge and beautiful houses, i half expect to meet hobbits ... im on Canterbury Road in Singapore , i slow down in my walk
Im covered with sweat ... i hear some strange sound near my ears ... did i overdo my workout ? Whats going on ? whats the strange sound , now its getting real louder , its so close by ...

I wake up in a pool of sweat , the power seems to have gone for quite a while . Its so hot inside the room ... i realize my cellphone alarm had been snoozed a couple of times ... damn i didn't get up early to go for a run in the park like i have been planning to ... i again slowly drift into sleep , before finally getting up when the never tiring alarm tries yet again to wake me up !

PS: I finally managed to defeat the tendency to press the snooze button and keep on sleeping and im actually going for morning jogs (atleast i did it 3 times last couple of weeks ! )

Broken Spell !

Right from ancient times , when human beings learned to communicate with each other , spelling was very important to the language. It was one of those vital things which ensured we communicated what we wanted to communicate correctly. We have always given utmost importance to getting this part right . Right from early stages of education in schools a huge stress has been given to spelling , in my school the teachers used to punish spelling mistakes by docking 0.5 marks for each error. An answer sheet with all words spelled correctly was the sign of an intelligent and well educated kid who will achieve something in life !

The main reason why i started writing this is because of a few things i noticed over last few months. In office we had to write a letter in normal paper with pen for some purpose and a friend of mine started writing and he couldnt write a single sentence without making spelling mistake ! "I always type on MS-Word dude", he told me , "it always corrects my spelling mistakes , i just need to supply the alphabets in somewhat correct order".
This was bound to happen to most of us who were working with computers for quite a while , only when he spelled it out i realized it !

I was surprised by his remark but still felt that such things wont happen people like me who were very good in English language since school days. However recently a friend of mine spotted 2-3 spelling mistakes in a mail i sent to him ( i don't run spell check on personal mails as we use words from Indian languages in it ! ) and then i realized that this spell-check dependency had affected me too !
Now this guy has a really good command over the language still i could spot a mistake in the mail he wrote me informing me about my spelling errors (these were not typos as they got repeated couple of times ) . Now i realise a lot of us will not able to spell 100% accurately like how we
used to do 6-7 yrs back when we did not use computers.
But the more i think about it , more i realize that knowing the exact spelling is no longer required in today's world , the computer is here to help you with it ! I guess the brain has realized this and no longer cares too much about getting the proper spelling of all the words typed !!!
The language purists will surely disagree and the schooling system will not drop its attitude towards getting spelling right , which i think is fair. But deep inside me im kinda convinced just like how my brain/subconscious mind felt while typing .. it no longer matters :)

The other day when Spelling Bee contest was getting aired on the TV , i simply changed the channel ... i really don't see the point of remembering such complicated spell(ing)s ... after all we are just Muggles !