The pandemic has brought people out on their bicycles. Are there books waiting to be written? | Publishing And The Pandemic - Scroll.in

This series of articles on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on publishing is curated by Kanishka Gupta.

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Dominic Franks, Scroll.in observes, The author of a cycling memoir sees a hundred stories blooming from the increased use of bicycles during the pandemic.

A page from 'Shikari’s Cycling Adventure'

In the month of May this year, Jyoti Kumari, a 15 year old girl from Bihar, cycled 1,200 km from Gurugram to Darbhanga in seven days with her injured father riding pillion because of their inability to pay the rent that their landlord was demanding. First reported by the BBC, and later retweeted by Ivanka Trump, her heroic feat turned her into an overnight sensation and the epitome of grit and girl power.

A fair number of friends WhatsApped me the story. Throughout the pandemic, no other story was repeatedly brought to my attention. Why? Because I happened to cycle from Bangalore to Delhi in 2010 in 23 days and wrote a book about it. This is the tenuous thread that binds us together.

I was embarrassed that Jyoti’s odyssey rekindled memories of my adventure among my friends. There is no comparison between our journeys. One was a necessity born of harsh circumstance, the other the gentle niggle of a childhood dream...

This reminded me of the most compelling, captivating person I met on my trip, whose childhood had been corrupted by the iron hand of poverty. A boy named Naren, who, like Jyoti, was 15 years old when I met him at a dhaba a few kilometres from Agra. He kept plugging me with questions: Where was I from? How far had I cycled? How much longer would I go? What had I seen? How many states had I travelled? What was our country like? Who were the people I had met?

He, too, just like Jyoti, had been forced out of an education to help his family financially. His dream was to be a doctor. When I asked him why he spoke of his dream in the past tense, he replied matter-of-factly that circumstances were such. From dreaming of being a doctor, he had sublimated his dream to becoming a truck-driver. 

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Source: Scroll.in