R.S. Vaidyanathan, resident of South City 1, shares why and how much he is in love with his walking stick
“I am a nonagenarian”. I use a Walking Stick. It improves my posture and keeps me in perfect balance when I walk. I feel comfortable with my walking stick, even though I resisted
using it for a while!
I bristled, therefore, at the poet W.B. Yeat’s verse: “An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick.” I may be aged, but nowhere near paltry or tattered, I am happy to report, that I do love my walking stick!
My father started using his walking stick as a style statement in his late forties. He would come back from the Post Office where he worked, around 8 pm each evening, announcing his arrival with the “tok-tok” sound of his walking stick. We always waited for him to come to have our dinner together. He used to hand over the stick to one of us at home. I considered it a privilege to hold it in my hand and caress it fondly.
Memories take me back to my quaint little village in Kerala- which in the 1940s, had two rows of brick and mortar houses, with sloping terracotta tiled tops, separated by a 25-foot wide road. A total of ninety houses, 45 on each side. The length of the road from one end to the other would not have been more than 1500 feet. There were two deep wells for drinking water, one in the middle and one towards the end of the road. There were two temples at each end of the road. Beyond that was a vast open space with a large water tank next to a majestic banyan tree, with evergreen leaves.
The village had no electricity. Lamps lit with kerosene oil were the norm every evening.
Adjacent to the two deep wells stood two iron poles. On top of the poles was a glass-enclosed lamp with a shade, lighting up a fair distance. The village crier’s duty was to light up the lamps every evening along with walking the length of the village with a stick in his hand. He used the stick to strike the road to produce the sound of a mild thud. The villagers were thus lulled to sleep, reassured with the thuds of the stick that there was no fear of thieves!
The image of more glamourous walking sticks, to me, is epitomized in that of Charlie Chaplin with his iconic stick! And then there is the image of Mahatma Gandhi with his walking stick firmly etched in my mind. For the Dandi march, the Mahatma walked 241 miles in 24 days with his faithful stick! I also remember the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who famously remarked on his walking stick: “ walking with Destiny ”! More recently, reams have been written over the Sengol in the New Parliament Building – was it a walking stick or had a more glorious connotation? Well, one could go on an on!
Just proves my point that Mr. Yeats was most wrong- age is just a number, and certainly not a tattered coat hanging on a stick!
Let me end with a quote from Rudyard Kipling “ Life is a journey you undertake, and it makes one emotional, that it is not what you have covered, but it how you cover that ”!
