Dear Reader,
There is something about running that lends itself to literature and movies (think Run Lola Run or Chariots of Fire). Murakami enumerated some of the reasons for this in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running—he said that the emptying of the mind accompanying the physical exhaustion caused by running makes space for new ideas to abruptly creep in. The act of running also encapsulates within itself the idea of running away—from people, situations, oneself—something we do throughout our lives. And while we run on, time, which binds us to the earth, keeps running out: “But at my back I always hear/ Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;/ And yonder all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity”, as the poet reminded his coy mistress, asking her to make up her mind about him quickly. Indeed, no matter who or what we manage to escape by running away from them, we cannot outrun time.
So, in a philosophical sense, nobody can win a race. Lewis Carroll explained this through the caucus race in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where all the participants run haphazardly around in every direction, and everybody wins. The Cheshire Cat tells Alice that she does not have to choose a specific destination since she will get somewhere just by walking (or running) long enough.
Which is what Stamata Revithi did during the summer Olympics of 1896, at a time when women were excluded from the marathon. Not allowed to run with the men, she set off alone, dressed in a long skirt and wooden-soled sandals. She covered the distance in 5 hours and 30 minutes, slower than the winner but better than at least 8 of the 24 participants, making history as the first woman marathon runner. Revithi’s story will resonate with female athletes even today—as an impoverished single mother, she ran in the hope that the publicity would help her get a job. Pointedly, there is no record of her life after the marathon.
Sohini Chattopadhyay’s book, The Day I Became a Runner, examines the lives of eight female athletes from independent India to show how they have challenged patriarchy by taking up this solitary sport. Pierre de Coubertin, co-founder of the International Olympic Committee, was against women taking part in the Olympic games because he believed that the presence of female athletes would adversely affect the male contestants. There are female athletes aplenty today, but we cannot say that the general attitude towards them has changed drastically from Coubertin’s time. Read Sharda Ugra’s brilliant review of Chattopadhyay’s book here.
Another must-read article from the recent issue of Frontline is Vivek Narayanan’s thought-provoking and expansive essay on Adil Jussawalla and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s later body of works. Narayanan’s own 2022 book of poems, After, is inspired by the Ramayana. With Ram on everybody’s mind these days, Aditya Mani Jha’s essay on Narayanan and After from the Frontline archives absolutely deserves a read now.
I will go on a run now… to get ideas for the next newsletter. Till then, adieu!
Anusua Mukherjee
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