I got busy with my routines and forgot about the conversation. I guess, over time my mind’s “recycle bin” had been grown more active at the cost of rest of it. Anything that didn’t touch me deeply was quickly trashed into the recycle bin. I should say it in my defense that I wasn’t arrogant and thinking of myself high but as I imagined that there were so many fascinating things that I wasn’t aware of, I simply didn’t want to waste my time on less fascinating things. An afternoon, on of way back from University, I saw the teacher again. I paddled faster my bicycle past the teacher so he couldn’t see me.
I had a mixed feelings about our first conversation. Some of the teacher’s ideas were new for me but as I felt that I had embarrassed myself by jumping from one question to another without adding something meaningful, I wasn’t ready to go through another session of embarrassments that soon 😛.
I escaped from being noticed by the teacher but I failed to take him out of my mind. In the conversation, he mentioned the “wisdom of East”, and at that age wisdom appeared to me something mysterious that special people possessed. I wanted to know what teacher actually meant by wisdom of East. My earlier experiences with what I considered part of the “Wisdom of East” weren’t pleasant.
I had watched some of the martial arts movies and read some rudimentary books on the power of breathing and concentration exercises and tried some of those exercises without any positive results 🙈. I concluded that one of the two things are true; either those exercises were just imaginations of the charlatans or they needed some special talents and I had no talents for such things. I actually tried to learn them from the “experts” as well. I remember that in our neighborhood, a new Kung-Fu master arrived. He started a class in a dark and damp basement. The basement had neither windows nor stairs. In order to get into the basement, one had to climb down a ladder that was placed against a square hole cut in the floor of first floor. I visited the club several times to see the skill levels of the master. The master had the same hair style, body shape, walked and screamed like Bruce Lee except that Bruce Lee was shorter and didn’t wear the red ribbon like the master. May be Bruce Lee didn’t need red ribbon for evil eyes or personal charisma 🙏.
I got impressed and enrolled in the class, despite not having money for uniforms. The master allowed to practice with regular activewear. In the class, everyone had a practice partner. The partners practiced kicks and punches on each other and exercised together. My partner was a fat bakery boy who was older than me a couple of years. I really enjoyed punching and kicking his pulpy body. He had heavy hands but his punches didn’t hurt. He wasn’t able to kick and that was fun too. But that wasn’t all. During abdominal exercises the partners had to cross their legs and do the workouts. My partner was a gaseous guy and lost total control during abs exercises and that was disgusting. The basement was already a microcosm of advanced level of global warming. It was hot, damp and filled with smell of perspiration of the students and I like Bangladesh I had to bear the most of my partners greenhouse gases. I bore all those things just to get enlightened by the master’s lectures. At the end of each session, he delivered a brief lecture. But all those lectures were about not using our improved punching and kicking abilities in the street fights. Those lectures didn’t work at all, as I actually started looking for troubles to test the improvements 😈. After a few months, I got bored with repetition and left the class. Years later, a new large multi-story building was constructed which had a large, well-lighted and aerated basement. The master had also earned a good name for himself. I enrolled in the class in hope to see the concepts in the practice. The master, somehow stressed more on improving the physical strength than teaching the art. He kicked and punched with full force on the stomach, back and legs. I left the class in a month as I didn’t want to live with damaged internal organs and nerves all my life.
As the Afghan teacher didn’t require any special uniform, he didn’t charge me for conversation and I had not to tolerate the greenhouses and beatings, and hoped that the teacher might had known things that I didn’t, I decided to meet him again.
Continued….
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