Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Write-a-thon

Among other things, this generation will be remembered for its obsession to physical fitness. Almost every person who maintains a reasonable standard of living must be working out or at least experienced it once. They in fact burn their calories even before their food is digested. So much is the fascination that even donations are related to exercise of some sort. There are marathons, walk-a-thon, hop-a-thon, bike rides happening frequently all around the world. Recently I heard of a person raising money by climbing the stairs of Sears Towers in Chicago. So now we have climb-a-thon for the enthusiastic stair climbers. I read in a story about charity fundraising through bungee/plane jumping. Not sure if that got implemented in the real life. I realized the library close to my home had a weekend reading. Basically, you come to the library and read for 48 hours to your heart’s content. I doubt whether it was a fundraiser.

My workout till now has lasted a day. I do have taken part in couple of activities at school. Not sure if these will be counted. As kids, we used to have silly contests amongst ourselves such as who takes the lecture notes fastest or who can write in smallest handwriting or how much of lecture notes one can scramble in one page or how many books/comics can be finished in the 30 minute library time. I can’t say how much went inside our heads but these were fun nonetheless. The contests used to continue as who would reach home first without running and things of that order.

This brings out the basic nature of humans of getting involved. People nowadays are obliged not only to give money but also calories for a good cause. I wonder whether we will ever have cook-a-thon (you get to give money as well as food), meditate-a-thon or skip-a-thon. One thing that will never surface out is sleep-a-thon, which anyone will be too pleased to oblige.

To evolve or not...