The Weight !

Hi, when I had finally blogged here again after a looong gap...I had decided that I would post at least one blog per week (in spite of the fact that hardly anyone reads them...apart from my good friends on whom I more or less forcefully thrust my blog-link. ;o)

So, here I am, sitting on my laptop at 6:40AM (yeah...it's early)...and already late for my weekly blog post.

Today, I'll have to tell you about one problem that has been acting in a very peculiar manner ever since I was a kid. And that's 'My Weight'. Nope- I am not overweight and this isn't me cribbing about how to loose weight but it's exactly the opposite.

This is the story of those underweight people who do all they can to gain some weight but only end up cursing the weighing machine when the needle refuses to budge beyond their current weight. I, unfortunately fall into the category of those underweight people....you know the lanky ones with the bony frames whose shoulder-blades visibly seem to be the only thing holding their bodies and preventing them from falling into a heap of twig-thin bones and skin.

I have been keeping a watch on my weight and surprisingly and rather peculiarly - it seems to be following a certain pattern. In this pattern- my weight increases by a few (visibly negligible) kilos every 3 years or so. Every time in those three years, I climbed onto a weighing-machine - the needle refused to go beyond my previous weight. It was as if- all the weighing machines in the world had conspired against me and had been bribed not to show an increase of my weight.

It all started when I was in the 9th standard.... my weight then was around 53kgs. That's not bad because in that age- most boys tend to be around the same weight-category that I was in. And moreover, people didn't tease or mock me saying I was underweight. Plus I was one of the good athletes of the school (my best friend SiD was even better than me btw...I was the second best)...so almost no-one said anything about my weight.

The problem was that my weight seemed to remain stagnant over the next couple of years. It remained the same until I was reached my 12th standard. And all this while, guys around me were either growing taller or broader. I remained the bunch of bones with the minimal muscles of the class. And then in my 12th standard, one fine day- some distant relative who had come to our place after a very long time commented how I had grown a bit since he had last seen me(and that it turned out was when I was in the 6th standard).....at one point I was angry that he said i had grown only a bit in the last 6 years. But then I realized that the person had actually given me a compliment .....a compliment about my weight......something that occurred more rarely than the Hale-Bopp comet or India winning a cricket world-cup.

So, there I was, on cloud 9 looking at myself in the mirror and smiling away. I took out the old weighing machine in our house, and after a small prayer in front of it- stepped onto it. The needle shot towards 57 and almost gave me a shock(the shock of gaining so much weight would have been too good for me to withstand). ...then the needle fluctuated a bit, danced around 55 and finally settled on 56kgs. That meant I had gained a good 3 kilos in the last three years. An achievement in its own. It was not as if I didn't make any attempts to gain weight. I had two glasses of milk everyday(thanks to my mom who would patiently coax me to have the milk by adding stuff like chocolate syrup or making fruit-shakes or adding vanilla essence....this was because I was never a fan of cow-milk right since my childhood...those adventures will be unveiled in another blog some-day) to instigate bone-growth. Every time I realised my weight hadn't fluctuated even in the smallest possible way-I used to start having more food (over-ate) than my stomach could bare, for months in the hopes of gaining weight and had even started eating more and more fatty stuff like butter and good ol' ghee.

The next time I was this happy was when I was in the final months of my college. We had just 4 more months of college life left and my weight- since the day I had stepped into the college had remained on 56kgs. Since it was college, my parents blamed the constant weight on the hostel food (the hostel food was the first criminal who would be instantly crucified in any case of ill-health or even bad marks). But then, again it had been months since I had last checked my weight. In the first three years, I would shuffle around in my pocket for a 'new' one rupee coin every time I went to the railway-station and then go on checking my weight in at least 3 machines in the hopes that one of them would be faulty and show that my weight had gone beyond 56kgs. But this time was different, I had had the feeling that I had put on some decent amount of weight in the last 4-5 months. And again, after a short prayer to the almighty (whom I only seemed to remember before my exams and before I stepped onto a weighing machine)- I gingerly stepped onto the weighing machine. This weighing machine was the one at the railway station and so it didn't have any needles to watch for, only adding to my anxiety and testing my patience. The machine made a few rattling noises and with a short burp- chucked out the small yellow card that shows the weight on one side. I picked it up and turned it around - and Voila! It showed my weight as 59kgs. I was happy and made a note that it had been more the three years since my last incident of weight gain. Just to make sure that the weighing machine wasn't lying to me or hadn't been tampered with just to make fun of me, I checked my weight on two more machines and they all showed the same.....one of them even showed an additional o.5kgs on the 59kgs. So that was it, had gained 3 whole kilograms. Over the next few weeks, I publicly and unabashedly advertised the fact that I had put on weight to most of my friends and to anyone who cared to listen to a guy who wanted to talk about his weight and who expected a reaction from you.

I sit here today, almost one year later, weighing 59kgs and knowing pretty well that my weight will remain the same until 2011. Let's hope that I break this trend that my body seems to have set ad that I gain weight before 2011. Pray for me!

Peace!

:o)