Where There is a Wheel
Kartikeya Ramanathan
The narrator in Dick Francis’s To The Hilt describes his eccentricity by saying, quite baldly, yet with a hint of pride, “Some are born weird, some achieve it, others have weirdness thrust upon them.” The narrator is Alexander Kinloch, who runs away from the real world to paint and play bagpipes on a deserted mountaintop. Siddharth Rajan, on the other hand, quit a job to ride a unicycle.
That was six years ago. Rajan was 20, a biomedical engineer from Bangalore working in Singapore, when he heard of a group in the city which used to play hockey on unicycles (one-wheeled cycles). “Being interested in alternate and endurance sports, I found the idea quite exciting and got in touch with them,” says Rajan. “From there on, I learnt how to ride the unicycle, quit my job, and moved to Australia that year to test my new-found abilities.”
Not every day do you find ordinary people chucking a good job on a whim. But Rajan was determined to go the distance with his childhood interest in endurance sports. “As a boy, I would keep falling ill, but that made such sports more appealing to me,” he says. At the age of ten, he went on a one-week camping holiday with his family to the Himalayas. “That small break showed me that my state of mind was more important than my physical strength,” says Rajan.
The balancing act on a unicycle took him more time than he had bargained for. “It usually takes people three weeks to learn how to ride the unicycle. It took me six months. Perhaps I was older than the rest, or perhaps I had a problem with my balance. But I never thought of giving up. I also knew that once I did master it, I would test myself in the most gruelling fashion I could think of – in Australia,” he says.
In 2006, Rajan participated in the Laos Unicycle Tour, a 500-km ride through Laos with 19 unicyclists—his first competition. Since then, he has travelled across nine countries on his unicycle, including a 500-km ride from Delhi to Lahore in 2007. His toughest ride was in 2009, when he travelled alone across Australia— 5,700 km in 86 days, from crowded cities to the great outback.
“Australia is sparsely-populated and has a harsh climate. I was worried about a possible injury or an equipment failure, especially in remote glades. Then, there were road trains, the 36-metre-long trucks which tower over the roads. This was also the time when attacks on Indian students had started to make news,” says Rajan.
Every day, he would start at sunrise, and cycle for 7-8 hours, covering, on an average, 100 km. “I would stop in the afternoon, set up camp, eat and rest for the next day’s journey,” he says. His ride was more or less incident-free, except for one fall. “Around 1,200 km into the ride, I hit a bump on the road and fell. My unicycle had a 36-inch diameter. Fortunately, I escaped with a few scrapes and bruises. But I could only cover 73 km that day,” he says.
All along, his Bangalore-based family (his father’s a civil servant) have stood by him, even when he quit his job. While he was preparing for his ride across Australia, his family members joined him in Melbourne, and even learnt how to the ride the unicycle.
Now, he wants to cross an ocean, preferably the Pacific, on a paddle boat. “A friend suggested that I ride the unicycle from Australia to India, using ferries to cross the seas. Another option was riding the unicycle on land and rowing on water. But I’d rather pedal. Hence, a paddle boat built to the same specifications as an ocean-rowing boat.”
Sporting goods manufacturers usually finance his trips, but it has been difficult to find sponsors for the Pacific trip. “Few companies are willing to try out something new. Endurance sports have very few sponsors,” says Rajan.
However, he does acknowledge the dangers of crossing an ocean “Storms are a risk. Big ships are another major threat. Most of the risk factors will be eliminated by the boat design and equipment. The rest is up to me and my judgement. Frankly, I feel that my enterprise is less risky than climbing Mount Everest,” he says.
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