Swami was preparing for a 10K run in three months. Over the last couple of weekends, while having his coffee, he had complained to us about how big a war it seemed to him.
“Why don’t you ask Sam to help?” Jigneshbhai asked him over coffee the last time.
“Sam doesn’t realise it. He is a triathlete. He runs 10K in his sleep,” Swami replied. “All he says is focus on the next fifty meters,” he added. “’One step after another, one foot ahead of the next,’ that’s Sam’s battle cry,” Swami had told us.
So when we met the other day, Swami looked sore from his latest practice run and ordered a cold coffee to compensate. Jigneshbhai, meanwhile, read out from a book he was carrying.
“Did you know that the major wars in history have hundreds of battles and skirmishes, on an average, some major, some minor, some insignificant, some decisive?” Jigneshbhai asked me and Swami after we settled down over with our cups of coffee. The big book he read from occupied a large part of the table today. Completing that book seemed like a war in itself.
“Why is he studying wars in history now?” Swami probed me while biting into his muffin. I shrugged my shoulders in ignorance. I had no idea about this new interest of Jigneshbhai.
“The second world war had more than one hundred significant battles, if you count the ones that happened across the Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean, Western and Eastern fronts. If you add the battles in Southeast Asia, China, and Africa, it will add a few hundred more,” Jigneshbhai eagerly read out.
Jigneshbhai then looked up and with excitement declared, “There is nothing like a big war. It is a series of small battles one after the other that need to be dealt with.”
Swami and I took a small bite from our muffins.
“Like the small bites you are taking to finish this big muffin,” Jigneshbhai continued pointing at us. “It is the same with any endeavour that we may be undertaking,” he added.
Swami and I looked at each other with our mouths full. The chocolate muffin didn’t seem like a battle to us. But to our dear friend engrossed in his new interest, everything looked like war.
“Don’t we see that in the test matches of cricket? It looks like a five-day game, but actually it is played session by session,” he now added, glancing at the live cricket telecast on the TV on the wall of the café. Swami and I stole a glance of the test match proceedings and nodded in agreement with Jigneshbhai.
“Actually it is not even session to session. If you come to think of it, it is played over by over, or even ball to ball,” he said. “After all, a side needs to lose only twenty wickets to lose the test. All it means is less than four overs,” he added.
Swami and I nodded our heads in agreement again. But we had had enough of this war mongering business from our friend. We were unable to understand why he was talking about it. That’s when he came to the point that he had been trying to make.
“So Sam was right last time,” Jigneshbhai added.
Swami’s eyes lit up with attention. The soreness in his body temporarily went into the background and the curiosity on his face replaced it. Swami and I waited for our friend to complete.
“There is nothing like running a 10K,” he declared. “All you have to do is focus on the next fifty meters.”
Hearing this, Swami’s face deflated like a tyre that had been hit by a nail out of the blue.
“It is easy for you to theorise sitting here, reading books on war and eating muffins,” Swami’s wrath came up in an unexpected way. “But in a war, the battles have to be fought every day. Only the foot soldier knows the pain of that battle,” he added.
Swami was right this time, I felt. While it may be all fine to say that there is no war, the fact remains that the battles are real. While I was pondering over this in silence, my friends Swami and Jigneshbhai exchanged scowls. That’s when the wealthy old man walked across from the neighbouring table towards us.
He gave Swami a sympathetic smile. Then he added, “The battles are real. But all that we have to do is focus on the current battle; and the war will take care of itself.”
***