Geetanjali Krishna: The weight of city life

The other day, I found a stocky young man doing squats outside my gate. Now as anyone who has ever done this exercise would attest — although it’s great for the gluteal muscles, it’s undignified, to say the least. I hastily averted my eyes and walked on. Later in the day, when I stepped out again, there he was, doing push-ups against a tree. I studiously avoided the sight of him, wondering why he had chosen to exercise exactly in front of my house. However, the next day, when I found him swinging two full bottles of water overhead like an overweight wrestler, I couldn’t contain my curiosity any further. “What are you doing?” I asked him, “and why are you doing it outside my gate?” He told me that he had just been appointed as salesman in a shop nearby. “I desperately need to lose weight, so I exercise here in this quiet corner whenever I get a tea break,” he said.

The chubby young man’s name was Manoj. His father and 30-year-old brother had been diagnosed with hypertension and high cholesterol, and the doctor had told the 20-year-old that he was headed in the same direction unless he shed at least 20 kgs, and fast. How had matters come to such a pass, I asked? It was all because they’d stuck to their village diets long after migrating to the city, he said. “We should’ve never come here,” he said gloomily, “we’d have been fine if we’d stayed in the village...”

Manoj, I soon learned, was crying over milk that had been spilt two decades ago, when his family migrated from Panipat to Delhi. “My grandfather and father were farmers until they got an offer they couldn’t refuse for their farmland,” he said. The move from the village to the city suddenly caused a sharp drop in their levels of physical activity. “In the village, my grandfather and father worked in the field. My mother tended the animals and looked after the house. Even us, the children, had to cycle five kilometres to go to school,” he said. In contrast, when they arrived in Delhi, his father got a job as a driver, the brothers started going to school in DTC buses while the mother discovered the comforts of city life. However, being jats and strict vegetarians, their diet of desi ghee, full-fat milk, lots of jaggery and more wheat than vegetables, stayed unchanged. Soon, Manoj’s father and brother developed hypertension and high cholesterol. Then routine tests revealed that his mother had diabetes. Manoj became quite overweight. And that’s what led him to exercise under the trees outside my house.

“My grandfather blames our family’s ill-health on evils of city life,” he said ruefully, “he just can’t believe that modern medicine decrees that all the food that we used to eat in the village (and still do, but in smaller measure) is actually not good for us any more!” In contrast to happier days, the family’s evening meal is now a solemn one. The father lays off the ghee. The mother lays off the sweets. The two brothers lay off almost everything in their desperate desire for weight loss. And the grandfather glares at them all, reminiscing about the good old days in the village when they all ate like horses and still remained healthy. Manoj gave his makeshift weights one last moody twirl and said, “I don’t know whether my grandfather is right in his thinking. But everyday, when my mother cooks boiled vegetables instead of besan laddus, I sigh and wonder whether the move from the village has been worth it… .”