What I really want to do at this point is pen an outstanding composition, something that'll have me marvelling at my own talent - a brilliantly refreshing, thought-provoking, original piece of text that'll leave my readers gasping for more.
But that's way too much work, so I'm just writing a sequel instead.
Therefore, here's presenting...Teenage Tales - II, Learning To Swim! (To see how it all began, click here for my original Teenage Tales story)
Oh, wait...in the interests of accuracy, I guess this is actually a prequel, because I'm almost sure I learnt swimming before I learnt riding. Hmmm...no wonder I always flunked my history exams. But anyways...enough with the mindless drivel, and on to the narrative!
It all started when I was a very little kid...a tiny schoolboy...about 9 or 10 years of age. A tender loving boy who would look up at the world around him with wide eyed innocence and greet each new day with a sunny smile. Why someone would want to take this gentle child of nature and drag him, kicking and screaming, to Hotel Deccan Continental and toss him into the savage, untamed waters of the swimming pool there is beyond me. Who knows, maybe it builds character.
To help you relate, here's a 'before' pic. Me smiling happily, surrounded by loving classmates.
And here's me in the swimming pool, features grotesquely distorted due to sheer terror.
One of the main contributors to this ghastly event was my swimming coach. Again, my disinclination for history results in my forgetting his name, so lets call him, say, Mogambo. Purely for the sake of convenience.
Incidentally, Mogambo had a dad who was also a swimming coach at the same place. Mogambo Sr. was a gentle old man whose lessons consisted primarily of having kids sit by the pool, hold hands and splash their feet in the water. However, as fate would have it (I'm sure my parents gave fate a quick nudge or two, but haven't been able to find any conclusive evidence so far) I was deemed unworthy of his instruction and was assigned to Mogambo Jr, a man far truer to his name. Here's pics of the father-son duo...I'm sure you'll note the family resemblance.
Far left - Mogambo Sr.
Center - Mogambo Jr. (Fully clothed)
Far right - Mogambo Jr. (In swimsuit and boots)
Well, that's all for now, folks! Until my next post...keep it real ;-)
But that's way too much work, so I'm just writing a sequel instead.
Therefore, here's presenting...Teenage Tales - II, Learning To Swim! (To see how it all began, click here for my original Teenage Tales story)
Oh, wait...in the interests of accuracy, I guess this is actually a prequel, because I'm almost sure I learnt swimming before I learnt riding. Hmmm...no wonder I always flunked my history exams. But anyways...enough with the mindless drivel, and on to the narrative!
It all started when I was a very little kid...a tiny schoolboy...about 9 or 10 years of age. A tender loving boy who would look up at the world around him with wide eyed innocence and greet each new day with a sunny smile. Why someone would want to take this gentle child of nature and drag him, kicking and screaming, to Hotel Deccan Continental and toss him into the savage, untamed waters of the swimming pool there is beyond me. Who knows, maybe it builds character.
To help you relate, here's a 'before' pic. Me smiling happily, surrounded by loving classmates.
And here's me in the swimming pool, features grotesquely distorted due to sheer terror.
One of the main contributors to this ghastly event was my swimming coach. Again, my disinclination for history results in my forgetting his name, so lets call him, say, Mogambo. Purely for the sake of convenience.Incidentally, Mogambo had a dad who was also a swimming coach at the same place. Mogambo Sr. was a gentle old man whose lessons consisted primarily of having kids sit by the pool, hold hands and splash their feet in the water. However, as fate would have it (I'm sure my parents gave fate a quick nudge or two, but haven't been able to find any conclusive evidence so far) I was deemed unworthy of his instruction and was assigned to Mogambo Jr, a man far truer to his name. Here's pics of the father-son duo...I'm sure you'll note the family resemblance.
Far left - Mogambo Sr.
Center - Mogambo Jr. (Fully clothed)
Far right - Mogambo Jr. (In swimsuit and boots)
The first lesson that Mogambo tried to teach me was to kick my legs. I was to stand in the water, push back and kick my legs with smooth scissor strokes and they would magically rise until they were on the surface of the water. Well, sounds easy but it didn't work. The harder I kicked, the harder my toes would strike the ground. Took me seven whole days to get my feet off the ground, and that was probably only to due to the extra buoyancy offered by my swollen toes.
Inspired by my success, Mogambo then took me to step 2 - swimming unaided in the deep end. There was, of course, an intermediary period of one day where he showed me how to move my hands, which I did with so much enthusiasm that everyone within 5 feet of the pool was soaking wet.
So it was that I was standing, trembling by the deep end on day 9, eyeing the water with much trepidation. Mogambo gave me a quick word of advice "Just beat your legs and hands all at the same time" and encouraged me into the water with a quick shove. What followed next was the most singularly horrible experience of my childhood. I would trash about for a few moments and then sink like a rock. Mogambo would grab me, raise my head above the surface and shove me a few feet further...and the process repeated till I reached the other end. To his credit, he did offer some useful words of advice while shoving me around, like "keep your mouth closed when you're drowning".
Perhaps it was the natural resilience of childhood, but this crude method actually worked. My understanding of swimming progressed with each passing day. And a week later, I fully understood that if I took a running leap into the water instead of waiting to be shoved, I would cover half the breadth of the pool or more before landing, which would consequently ease my struggles considerably. And no one would be the wiser. And it worked! I was happy, my parents were thrilled with my enthusiasm, and Mogambo didn't quite know what to make of it.
He realized eventually, of course, and came up with a cunning scheme to foil my well laid out plans, namely making me swim full lengths. I was flabbergasted, needless to say. A 10 year old kid cannot leap 15 metres in the air, unless he's Spiderman or Anju Bobby George. I was neither.
So it was that my swimming instructions finally commenced in earnest. Its not like I gave in easily, I tried techniques like walking along the edge before jumping in, then swimming along the edge so I could grab the railings etc, but dad took to patrolling one end of the pool and Mogambo the other, thus effectively fencing me in the middle.
To cut a long story short, this continued for about 3 months...the entire duration of my summer vacations. I went back to school that year a broken kid who shuddered at the very thought of summer vacations. I didn't know it then, but there was a lot of shuddering left in my destiny.
Each year, my eyes were opened to increasingly horrifying horrors like learning to dive...a process that caused my stomach untold misery. I still haven't mastered this process, by the way. Then there was Mogambo's wicked twisted idea of a game, where he'd drop a coin in the water and we'd have to dive down to retrieve it. What was the point I'll never know...bursting lungs, noses and eardrums and we never even got to keep the damned coin. Then there were the races...where I'd move my arms and legs around in a frenzy, splashing so much water I couldn't even see where I was going, and when I was out of breath and finally stopped, I'd find myself only a third of the way down, and somehow facing the starting point.
Well, my trials and tribulations continued, but something did seep through my skull in the process and today I can proudly say that I am fairly proficient in the art of swimming. I have even gone so far as to enjoy it in limited measure. Apart from the fact that I can't dive, my skill at the races has increased to the point where I can actually reach the end only a few seconds behind the others. And of course, the best benefit is that swimming has done wonders to my physique. All those years of landing on my tummy have given it a healthy ribbed look, and I guess its natural that my arms and legs and torso have developed increased musculature to enable me keep up all the splashing.
Don't believe me? Here, see for yourself.
Inspired by my success, Mogambo then took me to step 2 - swimming unaided in the deep end. There was, of course, an intermediary period of one day where he showed me how to move my hands, which I did with so much enthusiasm that everyone within 5 feet of the pool was soaking wet.
So it was that I was standing, trembling by the deep end on day 9, eyeing the water with much trepidation. Mogambo gave me a quick word of advice "Just beat your legs and hands all at the same time" and encouraged me into the water with a quick shove. What followed next was the most singularly horrible experience of my childhood. I would trash about for a few moments and then sink like a rock. Mogambo would grab me, raise my head above the surface and shove me a few feet further...and the process repeated till I reached the other end. To his credit, he did offer some useful words of advice while shoving me around, like "keep your mouth closed when you're drowning".
Perhaps it was the natural resilience of childhood, but this crude method actually worked. My understanding of swimming progressed with each passing day. And a week later, I fully understood that if I took a running leap into the water instead of waiting to be shoved, I would cover half the breadth of the pool or more before landing, which would consequently ease my struggles considerably. And no one would be the wiser. And it worked! I was happy, my parents were thrilled with my enthusiasm, and Mogambo didn't quite know what to make of it.
He realized eventually, of course, and came up with a cunning scheme to foil my well laid out plans, namely making me swim full lengths. I was flabbergasted, needless to say. A 10 year old kid cannot leap 15 metres in the air, unless he's Spiderman or Anju Bobby George. I was neither.
So it was that my swimming instructions finally commenced in earnest. Its not like I gave in easily, I tried techniques like walking along the edge before jumping in, then swimming along the edge so I could grab the railings etc, but dad took to patrolling one end of the pool and Mogambo the other, thus effectively fencing me in the middle.
To cut a long story short, this continued for about 3 months...the entire duration of my summer vacations. I went back to school that year a broken kid who shuddered at the very thought of summer vacations. I didn't know it then, but there was a lot of shuddering left in my destiny.
Each year, my eyes were opened to increasingly horrifying horrors like learning to dive...a process that caused my stomach untold misery. I still haven't mastered this process, by the way. Then there was Mogambo's wicked twisted idea of a game, where he'd drop a coin in the water and we'd have to dive down to retrieve it. What was the point I'll never know...bursting lungs, noses and eardrums and we never even got to keep the damned coin. Then there were the races...where I'd move my arms and legs around in a frenzy, splashing so much water I couldn't even see where I was going, and when I was out of breath and finally stopped, I'd find myself only a third of the way down, and somehow facing the starting point.
Well, my trials and tribulations continued, but something did seep through my skull in the process and today I can proudly say that I am fairly proficient in the art of swimming. I have even gone so far as to enjoy it in limited measure. Apart from the fact that I can't dive, my skill at the races has increased to the point where I can actually reach the end only a few seconds behind the others. And of course, the best benefit is that swimming has done wonders to my physique. All those years of landing on my tummy have given it a healthy ribbed look, and I guess its natural that my arms and legs and torso have developed increased musculature to enable me keep up all the splashing.
Don't believe me? Here, see for yourself.
Me wearing a US cap during a recent swimming session.
Well, that's all for now, folks! Until my next post...keep it real ;-)
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