Cycling In Delhi

I travel to come down off the feather-bed of civilization – RL Stevenson I do not remember when the thought of an inter-city bicycle ride first occurred to me. A friend came to drop me at the Tribune Circle in Chandigarh. We bade each other goodbye and from then on, I was on my own. I felt energetic and looked forward to the journey. Finally the day had come, I was living my dream. But as soon as I reached the outskirts of the city, doubt started raising its dreadful head.

_ .(_)_ /, \ . <_) |\ __/._ .-|/_ ` . ' ( . ) . | . : .d8b-'/ _ \.-./ _ a:f .-.-..-.--.--._ ( ( Y `n ____________'...`__________ '/ '-. . - : : # .v . ----==----- . .'-. ' .-,_.-' ( )_#_/ `-._. - --- -- ._.-' O/ # `/:_ --- - '., .-' "' # ` `=. . - _.-' # `-: . `: ' For more on the works of Andreas Fries take this link .

A news worth taking note of in the Hindu about how bicycles are slowly but surely going out of style in China. It surely makes us sit up and think 'what IS development'. Aren't we moving towards more wastage.

By Rahul Banerjee, Indore A bald man in his sixties dressed in spotless white and starched khadi and kurta and pyjama riding a bicycle with a ramrod straight back - that was my first glimpse of Bohreji when I came to stay in the moribund Gramodyog Vidyalaya Ashram in Machla village thirteen kilometers from Indore in 1994. I had just come out of the deep jungles of Jhabua advised by my doctor to take time off from grassroots activism to get rid of the malarial parasites that had made my body their home.

Sometimes a particular image becomes so ordinary that you stop noticing it; until a set of eyes come along for whom that same image is not so common. Here is a picture by Cheeni I liked very much. An image like this would not have stood out for me, but for its suggestive title. Yes, this is the most reliable, widely used, labour intensive gas pipeline in India.