Footsteps4good...

 

So I took part in the 10 km charity walk organised by Footsteps4good. To take part in the event, participants needed to make a donation to a charity of their choice and my company decided to go with Magic Bus. Magic Bus is an NGO that uses Activity Based Curriculum (ABC), a unique model that  uses games to make change. The games excel in building physical, social and personal skills.

Coming back to yours truly, I honestly went there for a lark. D was all enthusiastic about taking part in the event and some of her infectious enthusiasm rubbed off on staid old me and in a moment of madness I signed up for the walk, all the while thinking, "I'll walk for a couple of kilometers and then beat it, no one is going to notice a missing walker.' What I had not bargained for was that fact that half the junta at the walkathon had the same thought process. 

However I can proudly say that I not only completed the 10 km walk I did it in good time - 1 hour 53 minutes... my personal best record. Also thanks to this event, come January 2013 I might just be able to run on behalf of an NGO at the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon!!!

Cheers to life...

Table Tennis...

Now that my knee, back and other sundry body parts which were on strike for the better part of last year have relented and I slowly limp (pun unintended) back to normalcy, I seem to have discovered a new found love for sports... to be more specific for Table Tennis.

To be honest, all my life I had a strange loathing for this game, for the life of me, I could not understand what joy people got by whacking a plastic ball onto a table with something that resembled a tiny frying pan. Also the rules were something that I never could get a grasp of no matter how hard I tried to follow the game...

for e.g.:

1) How did they keep track of the serve, to my mind it seemed like one person served till eternity

2) While serving the ball had to bounce on both the sides of the net, else it was out, and I just couldn't get the ball to bounce once...forget twice for i'm an avid badminton player and every time the table tennis ball came in my direction I hit it high into the sky and sent it sailing across the room (Again I play gully badminton, bring in RULES and I blank out)...

3) Ask me to watch a doubles Table Tennis match and normally I would bolt faster than Ussain Bolt to get out of the room where the match is being played... as I find the doubles rules even more enigmatic.

But then something happened last week and I'm now a convert. It all began when I moved teams, my new team sits right outside the room which contains the Table Tennis table. Now this room has become a hive of activity ever since my company announced its own version of the Olympics with three different indoor game events ( Carrom, Chess and Table Tennis) and staff are encouraged to take part is large numbers. Yours truly hasn't touched a Carrom Board or Chess Board in the past ten years and hasn't ever played Table Tennis  barring the few feeble attempts at mastering the game while in school which sorely failed... so taking part in any of the events was out of question, the sentiment being, "Better a Spectator than a Spectacle!".

My colleagues however took part in large numbers and I would drop in to see them practice and one day I confessed to one of the more avid Table Tennis players that I was at sea. He took it on himself to enlighten me about the game and as they say in the penny thrillers...something happened. I must say it was like the moment in the movie Matrix where Neo realises he is THE ONE and everything just falls in to place... I was hooked. A few tentative games later I was playing like one who played this game all her life and all I can say to anyone who wants to play a game of Table Tennis with me is ... bring it on!!!