India - Part 1

It's taken me an age to get this done, and it probably needs an edit.  It's hard to condense an experience like this, in a country of such scale and history and mystique. It's hard to put into squiggles on a screen, how a small group of people have gone from being strangers or met-a-handful-of-times-colleagues to friends you feel a raw and direct love and admiration for, all through the compression of an adventure.  We are all so light on adventures, everything being so safe and secure-seeming.  We run from adventures, from their unfamiliarity.  We should be running (or riding) in the opposite direction.  

The day before, in the office with some of the young professionals who entered the industry through Amit's (my fantastic colleague who I've mentioned to you, on the right) Young Women in Investment program. Also in the picture, our new (super-spirited) CEO, Marg Franklin (who joined the start, on a bike, Mumbai morning traffic), front second from right, and Punita Kumar-Sinha, from the CFA Institute board, front second from left.  

For me this ride was a quietly perspective-changing adventure; I'm feeling its ripples today, and writing this hoping to feel them forever.  The start of this ride however is way before India.  It’s in the eighties and nineties for me, and broadly immersed in what it means to be a man.  

At work I met my divine now friend Iva.  She’s wide-eyed-bright, comfortable expressing her astute perceptions of people, and deeply sincere with a twinkle – it’s a formidable combination.  Her husband Mario, I warm to completely too – both children of a war-torn part of the world – and from it people of the no bullshit zone.  Iva commented to me, having both a son and a daughter, that if you go into a good toy shop, in the blue section, you have trucks and dinosaurs (and no-doubt guns).  In the pink section however, you have a wealth of stuff about girl-power, girl’s adventure, girls getting out there, explicit messages about what it now might mean to be a girl, rightfully breaking out of centuries of narrow imposition and confinement. She was pointing out that while there is (now) a wealth of narrative about what it means to be a woman in the modern world, there is surprisingly very very little about what it means to be a man.   

When I look back on my life and my career, I think I interpreted that – what it means to be a man – much more narrowly than I might have in different circumstances, with different pointers.  I think that publicly (driving, on the trains, in airports) and in the corporate world I’ve ended up being quite an aggressive, conflict welcoming, version of all the things that I might have been (alongside extroversion, friendliness etc).  I don’t think you have particularly seen this side of me – in part because your beauty is sun-like, so I’m so busy looking.  And it is in this regard that I write about India – and my experience of it, which is to say of a ribbon of road and a small group of men.  I mentioned to you, that one of my overriding impressions of the people on this trip was how tough they were.  And I’ve met a lot of tough people in my life.  People who looked tough, people who acted tough, it’s easy to find that sort of thing in a narrow macho world, of which I seem so boundlessly familiar.  But the version of toughness in the people I met and rode with was a much quieter, peaceful thing. Not puffed up and growling – just people who were able to cheerfully absorb hardship, while laughing and being kind and warm and human and decent and generous.  So it’s in that spirit that I write this – out of respect to that version of being a man, and how much it meant to me to be around, and hopefully how much I gained from it.  

Building Big Blue in the hotel room the day before, somehow it seems impossible to make this routine - this time, massively twisted brake and gear lines - like fishing line - its own thing.

So while this is an account of riding in India, its also an account of meeting and becoming: familiar; friends; connected; and of laughter and strange things and explanations and newness; new places, new food, new ways of going about things - and it was very very different to loaded bike solo touring, it was continually and beautifully peopled.

At the start, dawn breaking, luminaries (and huge credit to all of them) and eight people with bikes.

And so we were under way...