Random Walk

    When I think of Random Walk, the first thing that comes to my mind is the mathematical analysis and the most famous Markov processes. Hold it, you must be tempted to ask are you a geek? No I am not and so I am not allowed to wear this geeky
hat. So my random walk is slightly different, in fact very different and thankfully it does not involve any MATH in it.

    Ok, my random walk is the random desire that came to my mind today to go on a walk. Weather here in Boston gives you out of this world kind of feeling. So I could not resist myself and after having my homemade aloo partha from Edison, I decided to reinvent myself and go on a random walk. It was around 9:35 pm when I went out; by this time half of America goes to sleep. As I expected the parking lot and the streets were completely deserted. I still continued my random walk and made a random turn to a random street. And guess what? It turned out that I never knew there was a Citizens Bank just 100 yards from my apartment. This was just the first random place out of many which I discovered. I continued my random experiment and kept going on with my random walk. The weather was perfect for such a walk and my Iphone confirmed it by showing it to be 62^o F. Soft cool breeze blowing gently and the combination of a Pajama and a cool-dude T-Shirt made the experience amazing.

I decided to explore the unexplored street in my neighborhood and dared to enter it during these late hours. I could see infrequent fleet of cars but not even a single living creature nearby. I was waiting for the traffic to pass by so that I can cross the road and go to the other side and suddenly, a car stopped. Do you think I was getting intimidated or frightened?? Naah… but that did arouse suspicion in my mind. It did not last long as I could see a hand coming out of the car window and waiving indicating to move on and cross the road. I love this place, this is one of the few places where I have seen such a courteous drivers. Kudos to all those drivers who stop for the passerby and gives the pedestrian a sigh of relief. After getting to other side of the road I started walking and singing a popular Himesh’s number. Within 5 minutes I got my next random surprise, I saw a church which was again less than 300 yards from my apartment. I remember observing huge mass of people passing by this street but never realized that there was a church nearby. Around the church was a nice pedestrian walkway which I used for my next 15 minutes walk. I started imagining myself walking/running on this newly discovered walkway every morning. I wish I really did that, but for a person like me who wakes up at 2:00 pm on weekends it almost seems impossible. So I stopped my imagination and continued humming Himesh’s number.

Soon I decided to take a U-Turn and started heading back. Then my eyes went on to observe an Indian restaurant right across the street “Welcome Indian Cuisine” was the billboard, bright and glittering. I always found this place to be very unattractive from my car as this was the way which I passed by twice a day. But suddenly, when I had time to observe this place closely, I discovered that it was well structured and had quite a lot of free space and parking on both sides of the restaurant. Suddenly a place which was distasteful started appearing appealing. I could see many tables occupied with people wearing salwar kameez, the traditional Indian dress. My test buds started expressed their desire and I made this place to be my next gourmet venture for this weekend.

I continued and observed places such as a Medical Center, Auto repair shop, grocery store and so on. I turned to the familiar street which took me to my community parking lot and soon my random walk ended. It ended with a lot of discoveries and changed few of my viewpoints. Not to mention that it helped in digestion and made me feel better after a heavy dinner. I have decided that I will try to continue this decision of walking and make it a tradition. I also decided to continue with such random experiments which led me to my to-be random tradition (walk).

I would recommend everyone to go out of your apartment some day and experience the freshness around you. I can bet, if you have never done this before you will find at least one interesting observation during your random walk. Do share your experience if you happen to experience one of these random walks.

 

Cheers,

-Jimy Shah

Live 2 Eat don’t Eat 2 Live