Hey, look. There's a pony. And an Elephant.

It's a daily bike ride to the gym and the ensuing workout that keeps me going.  Amidst all the peaceful chaos that could drive normal people (from the United States) mad, one regularly timed activity in the day seems to be going to gym.  A little ವ್ಯಾಯಾಮ "vyaayaama," or (a nice word my new Kannada dictionary tells me) ಅಂಗನಸಾಧನೆ "anganasaadhane," or perhaps a little more locally spiced ಕಸರತ್ತು "kasarattu" all meaning exercise.
A small etymological thought to chew on: "vyaayaama"--the first word there--is a nice Sanskrit derived word.  It comes from a dhaatu, or verbal root "yaa" meaning 'to go'.  There's one wonderful stotra to the goddess that I like to chant, and a line of it asks,
इदानीं चेन्मातस्तव यदि कृपा नापि भविता निरालम्बो लम्बोदरजननि कं यामि शरणम््।
idaaniim cenmatastava yadi krupaa naapi bhavitaa niraalmbo lambodarajanani kam yaami sharaNam.
"This instant, all-compassionate devi (Mother), if even your kind compassion will not be there to whose shelter do I go, supportless?"
You recognize "yaami" in the transliterated sentence; that is the verb of this particular verse and it means "to go."  I've here translated it as "I will go."  "kam sharaNam yaami?"  To which shelter/whose protection will I go?  And similarly, with exercise we have the same "yaa" dhaatu, or verbal root.  But this time we see it has a "vyaa" preceding it.  The "vyaa" are known as 'upsarga', or "those which follow before."  There's a finite number of them and they are:

प्रपरापसमन्ववनिरदुरभिव्यधिसू््दतिनिप्रतिपर्यपयः। praparaapasamanvavanirdurabhivyadhisuudatinipratiparypayaha
उप आङिति विंशतिरेषः सखे उपसर्गगणः कथितः कविना।।
upa aaNgiti vimshatireShah sakhe upasargagaNa kathitah kavinaa

"This, friend, is the collection of twenty 'upasargas' as told by the poet:
praparaapasamanvavanirdurabhivyadhisuudatinipratiparypayaha upa aaNg.

You can count as well as I can to see there are twenty 'upasargas'.  This is in a cool meter known as तोटकम् which supposedly sounds like a snake because it rambles.  Kind of like me.  There's actually the precise same number and order of short and long syllables in this meter (8 and 8 making for 16 per line and 32 for the verse).
We see, then, that before "yaa" in one of the words for exercise there comes first a "vi" and then an "aa."  If you say "vi" and then "aa" it naturally turns into "vyaa," na?
"aa+yaa," then, comes to mean something like "passing," and specifically the passing of time.  And then "vi" is an interesting 'upasarga' because it can be either one thing (a negation), an elephant, or the opposite of one thing which is an 'intensifier'.  Here, though, in "vyaayaama," my bike-ride-etymology making tells me that it is, in fact, an intensifier even though I saw an elephant on my way to the gym.  Exercise is something which makes time go by faster; but, paradoxically, not when you're timing yourself on the treadmill.  It's more liable to speed up experience, or, perhaps, condition the body to engage more actively its world.  Then, distracted, with mind occupied through exercising body's calisthenic engagement of the world, time just flies.  And that's what made me realize why my week has gone by so quickly!  It's "vyaayaama."  Time passing quickly.  Exercise.
The other word my Kannada dictionary shared with me is "angasaadhane."  "Saadhanam" in Sanskrit is the nominalization of a ninth gana (group, out of ten groups) verbal dhaatu, or root, meaning "to do, or accomplish."  "Anga" is a Kannada tatsamah adoptation of the Sanskrit word "anga," meaning a "limb," or "part."  "Angasaadhane," then, means "to accomplish something with the body"--exercise.  In modern parlance, going to the gym.
If you're still reading this, I am impressed with your ability to endure a few minutes of my inner dialogue expressed on the 'blog!

Every day Subhash, a bike owning man who hangs around/lives/works here at this new Dhvanyaloka spread I'm living at, lends me that bike to ride about 2.5 km to the gym.  Its wheels are a little shaky, its hard seat wobbles forward and backward, and the brakes don't work too well.  Needless to say, all this makes for a great ride to the gym everyday!  The ride is mostly relaxing on the way to the gym when I can still see the textures of the roads; but after the gym, coincidentally, I think of myself as having turned into a whale.
A new type of nighttime sonar-awareness switches on in the brain, as if it is adjusting to another new register of the many it gears into and out of through the day.  This language, though, is of the shadowy murmurs an ornately adorned Goods Carrier's harvest-moon headlights grease upon the road textured with potholes and dirt piles and rocks.  As makes its way toward me, from the distance, its horn grows louder against the backdrop of those coming up from the rear while I pass a drunkard lying half-naked on the side of the road with four of his buddies arguing--intoxicated over something--and three bicyclists, one coming the opposite direction to me along with a car driven by a man hurrying to get money from an ATM where a cow is grazing on cabbage left by a bhajiwala who doesn't have a card but knows as much to sit where those who do emerge after they've parked their car with which they nearly hit, while rushing, a man who was riding by on a bike with no brakes and then scream from their window, "I'm sorry!" as he gears into park and I into 'whale mode'.  I think I know now how the whales feel about nautical traffic interrupting their song on the seas.  Eventually, my thought tells me, they won't mind it so long as we keep to our laws about no whale hunting.
And in that moment I realized not only what I think to be a whale's perspective, but also that I can't fault the apologetic driver for nearly hitting me.  If there are rules on the road here (or anywhere for that matter), one thing is for certain that nobody knows them.  Rules of road in the logic of law are simply psychic substance--infrastructure, if you will--that allow one person to cultivate what they think to be a better understanding of the 'rules' in order to fault those who don't follow, admitting that they among all others don't really know.  Kind of like the perspective of a whale.  Who the fuck am I to know a whale's perspective?
All sorts of complaining about hyperactive lawsuits in the U.S.A., I realized in this bike ride, stems from the fact that there exists all of this infrastructure, letters making words into an Aristotelian logic that is pretty like Ceasar's face and (ass) cheeks.  Here I have to learn not to fault people but to outsmart them, or rest comfortably in my sweet-assed fate.  There's something liberating about it, however dangerous.

Unfortunately, the metempsychotic physics of fate, when sculpting this body-vessel into a greek god, forgot the 'r' and instead created a geek who loves Sanskrit, dusty bike rides, and books the same way.  And now I need to stop 'blogging to do Sanskrit work.