44,03,891 steps to change India

Bharat Jodo is most like Mohandas Gandhi’s 24-day Salt March in defiance of British rules. As he walked, the crowd behind him swelled, as it has with Rahul. Pic/Dall-E 2

Full disclosure: I've never walked 10,000 steps. This number has acquired nearly magical overtones since author Malcolm Gladwell put it out in his 2008 book Outliers. Practise 10,000 hours to become a world-class pianist; run 10,000 miles to win a marathon; walk 10,000 steps a day for health.

There's no science behind 10,000 but it has become an urban legend. People earn doctorates trying to prove or disprove it.

What do you suppose would happen if you walked more than 10,000 steps? I know of a certain middle-aged man who has been walking 24 km a day since September 7. Things quickly got complicated when I tried to calculate how many steps that would be.

Apparently, your stride depends on your gender, height and your walking speed. Strollers take smaller steps. I learned that the gentleman in question was 52 years old and about 170 cm tall. He walked pretty fast, I heard; people had difficulty keeping up.

An online kms-to-steps calculator told me that he was doing 28,667 steps a day, taking 3 hours and 42 minutes.

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How long did he plan to keep walking? His goal, I learnt, was 44,03,891 steps. If he started in, say Kanyakumari, he would be in Srinagar at the end, having walked 3,687 km.

If 10,000 steps are good for health, what are 44,03,891 steps good for, I wondered?

The answer should wake you up. When you walk that much, you start improving the health of the people around you. More and more people start walking with you, faster and faster, trying to keep up. If you walked long enough, you could change lives in a whole country the size of India.

By now you've realised that I'm talking about Rahul Gandhi and his Bharat Jodo Yatra. I am generally sceptical of politicians and no longer an admirer of the Congress party. But I sat up when a close friend of mine, who is regularly depressed by the divisiveness and corruption of daily life in India, said that she had felt a surge of hope watching the tidal response to the Bharat Jodo Yatra.

It would be easy to dismiss Bharat Jodo as a political stunt by a sidelined party but that would do injustice to what's unfolding before our eyes - nothing less than the reincarnation of a young man once dismissed as effete, English-speaking, too westernised and out of touch with Indian realities.

The bearded Rahul Gandhi of Bharat Jodo is a reassuring, equable and attentive fellow, a well-informed thinker, thoroughly comfortable in his skin, able to engage vast crowds in chatty Hindi by naming and shaming the corrupt corporate realities in our daily lives.

He seems somehow to be speaking for lakhs of Indians, even in states like Uttar Pradesh where his party has no standing.

There is a moment in a YouTube video that says it all, coming about 7.20 minutes into his speech at Red Fort. "All your money, from the farmers, the workers, the roads, the airports - where does it go?" he asks the crowd. Just then he is distracted by a comment or a gesture from someone in the crowd. He turns in that direction and makes a conspiratorial face, eye-brows raised, half-smiling. It's a we're-in-this-together-dude look.

He answers his own question: "This country belongs to Adani and Ambani." And you might catch yourself thinking, This is not a leader, he's one of us.

Walks have a way of unseating those in power. A lone Chinese man faced down a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989, one of 1,00,000 or so gathered to peacefully mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, an ousted official who had championed reforms in China. The world stood up in support.

More than 2,00,000 people walked peacefully to Washington, DC, in 1963 to hear Martin Luther King describe his dream. A year later, the US Civil Rights Act was passed.

In January 2011, over a million Egyptians marched to Tahrir Square, fed up with the corrupt 30-year autocracy of Hosni Mubarak. They ousted him.

But Bharat Jodo is most like Mohandas Gandhi's 24-day march from Ahmedabad to Dandi to make salt in defiance of British rules. As he walked, the crowd behind him swelled, as it has with Rahul. The Salt March triggered the years of civil disobedience that finally drove the British from India.

I've seen videos of Rahul Gandhi walking. He's easy to spot: the only man in a summery, white t-shirt amid a sea of people swaddled thickly in black. It's the heart of northern winter but it seems to be summer around Rahul.

There's no question but that he's the briskest walker there. Everyone else is huffing and puffing along. It seems Rahul has no problem walking, talking and thinking all at the same time. And it's looking more and more like a whole country is following close behind him.

For a few moments, 2023 seems a whole lot brighter.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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