Oct 14, 2010
You must have seen trainers with a mike, guiding corporate executives in conference halls in your city or even in cooler climes in the mountains or wet ones on beaches. But have you seen trainers on a bike, cycling more than a thousand miles, giving lessons on positivity?
Meet Sanjay Noronha and Hemant Kumar, corporate trainers now and friends from college days more than a decade back. They had been separated by the dictates of their career over two continents - Sanjay is now settled in Cape Town, South Africa while Hemant is in Mumbai, India - but have now decided to get away from the air-conditioned halls and out of their suits to taste the sweat and dust of Indian roads, villages and towns.
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Why are they doing it? Says Sanjay, "We always wanted to do something like this. We wanted to merge our training ability and our desire to serve the community with our urge to do something that’s really challenging. We zeroed down upon this as a means of letting the message of positivity reach a few of those corners that we generally ignore in corporate boardrooms."
Hemant adds, "There are three intertwined messages: mental positivity, physical positivity and promotion of cycling. We see positivity as a panacea for the ills that we as individuals and as a nation suffer from."
They have picked up the bicycle as their medium of transport because they feel the bicycle is a lean, clean and green mode of transport that benefits one's health, the economy and the environment. They want to rid the bicycle the tag of the poor man’s vehicle that makes most Indians graduate to a motor cycle or a car the moment they can afford one. Indeed in a country like India, the bicycle may be our answer to pollution, oil conservation, obesity and heart disease put together.
Says Sanjay, "Being corporate executives, we wanted to dispel the notion that regular 9 to 5 kind of job holders could not do something like this. We really wanted to walk our talk and give our message of positivity through our actions, rather than words that we do normally in our training rooms."
They will be commencing their epic journey on November 17 from Mumbai and are scheduled to arrive at Delhi on December 6. Do they plan any similar journeys after this one? "Yes," says Sanjay, "we plan to go international." But he is tightlipped about where. "That we will announce on the day we complete this one," he smiles.
Are they getting support from the community? "Sure," says Hemant, "our website itself has been developed for free, in support of our objective. People on our route have been offering accommodation too in resorts, guest houses etc. We see a lot of enthusiasm in people’s responses to our blogs published on our site. Our feelings are being thoroughly reciprocated by the community."
Indeed. Just check their site, ‘http://www.cyclingforpositivity.com’ and you may want to be one of the respondents.
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