Muna Madan

Gurkha Nepalese Community (GNC), a Sydney-based Nepalese community organization, is staging Muna Madan as part of its annual Dashain festivities this year. A casual conversation with a dear friend of mine who also happens to be one half of a GNC power couple inspired the following thoughts about the most popular lyrical drama of the youngest Himalayan republic.

• Muna Madan is arguably the greatest work of Nepal's unarguably the greatest poet, Laxmi Prasad Devkota


• A miniature masterpiece, the work partly owes it popular appeal to its use of folk idioms and metres


• The drama centres around the trials and travails of a high-caste migrant worker journeying to Lhasa (Tibet) for work and back


• Apart from the constraints placed by a traditional society on romantic love, the drama also highlights the twin evils of casteism and manpower drain that have impeded Nepal's emergence from the dark shadows of its past


• The most famous line from Muna Madan, spoken by the high-caste protagonist to a "lowly" Bhote who nurses him back to health, is: "Man becomes great not by caste, but by heart"

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My City2Surf 2009 Performance

My preparations to run this year's City2Surf under 60 minutes were derailed by a combination of flue, nasty weather and good old inertia (the complete list of excuses actually runs longer than the world's biggest fun run!) Anyway, I clocked 69 minutes 9 seconds, improving last year's result by 39 seconds.

The unexpected 'improvement' - after a month of inactivity, my preparation consisted of four comfortable jogs over the week leading to the event - illustrates what I suspect is the exponential nature of the efforts required to improve one's speed. After a certain point, disproportionate inputs seem to require to exact minuscule gains in speed. Conversely, comfortable pace is not necessarily a prelude to a catastrophic loss (or, is that gain?) in time.

In a sense, running, even the fun ones, is all about timing. One has to know when to hold back and when to give all. As my preparation was far from ideal, I checked my impulse to go all out in the first kilometers even as other adrenaline-fueled runners zoomed past me. It was not until after around 10 km that I upped my tempo. When I crossed the finish line, I still had enough left in the tank to run another 5 km. Perhaps, I held myself back a bit too long but this did not prevent me from feeling very satisfied with my performance, especially considering the comfortable pace that improved on last year's result, which was achieved through far more lung-busting efforts.