The Chakli Story

I go to Dr. S N Omkar‘s yoga class, and he’s such a fun teacher! He has a unique way of telling stories during class. At first, we don’t get why he’s telling them, but by the end, it all clicks. I really enjoy this storytelling style. Here’s one of his stories.

In one class, we were told to do leg-raises, an exercise where you lay on your back and keep your legs straight and lift them up so as to make them perpendicular to the floor and drop them back again. We were told to do 25 leg-raises.

We started doing the exercise. Its particularly a difficult exercise and the abdominal area starts hurting quite a bit and the body tries all tricks to keep the pain low. The first 5 to 8 are easy but post that, every damn raise is such a painful thing to do. While the never ending ouchy endeavour was going on, Omkar sir, starts narrating a story.

He starts.

Two boys were given a job to sell a box of Chaklis each. They were instructed to roam the streets and offer these snacks to people. The shopkeeper had set the price at 1 rupee for each Chakli, and every box had 50 Chaklis. They took separate routes and started selling the Chaklis.

After sometime, the first boy was hungry. He saw his box and there were so many Chaklis. They were crispy and fresh and it looked even better as he was hungry. He took out a couple of Chaklis and ate them. Gawddd.. They tasted really really good. He wanted to stop but could not. He took a couple more and snacked them. He then told himself to stop.

Over the course of the day all the Chaklis got sold and the two boys returned to the shop. The shopkeeper asked for the money from the sales. Boy-1 handed over 46 rupees (as he was able to only sell 46 Chaklis) and Boy-2 promptly gave the shopkeeper 50 rupees. The shopkeeper was so angry with the first boy. He said, you lack integrity. How could you eat the Chaklis which you were supposed to sell. This is very wrong. Look at Boy-2, he is so truthful and did not even touch the Chaklis. Learn from him.

After getting all the scolding, the two boys returned from the shop. While returning Boy-1 asked Boy-2. Did you not get hungry at all? How did you not feel like eating even a single Chakli?

Boy-2 replied, of-course I felt hungry and of-course I ate the Chaklis.

At this stage, I had done almost 20 leg-raises. My body had decided that it cannot give any resources to my brain apart from the basic resource to the keep count of how many leg-raises have been done. But the story is was taking such a twist that I could not miss out what happened next. Now, both my brain and my body was taking up energy. May be this is what is called “mind and body workout”.

Boy-1 asked, how many did you eat?

Boy-2 said, I would have eaten atleast 10, if not more.

Boy-1 asked, then how did you manage to give 50 rupees in full to the shopkeeper?

Boy-2 replied, you ate the whole Chakli. I just ate a small part from the out circle of the Chakli. Who is going to be able to find that out. I ate small small parts from so many Chaklis that the overall quantity would have been more than 10 Chaklis.

At this stage, I am thinking, ok, that was a good twist. But how does it connect back to what we are doing. I had already thought of alternate endings to the story in my head such as “Boy-2 sold some Chaklis for a higher rate”, “Boy-2 had some money already with him” and so on. Even after all this energy burning in the head, I am not able to find out how this story connects with what we are doing.

Then Omkar sir said,

Like that, some of you are not doing the leg raises fully. You just raise it to 60 degrees or 45 degrees, bend your knees and count it as a full leg raise and claim you have done 25 leg raises.

I burst into laughter. I never expected this connection to happen. It was both funny and insightful at the same time.

Trivia Question: Why do some coins have ridges on their edges?

Answer: The ridges on coin edges, called reeding, started long back to stop people from shaving off bits of coins to steal metal like the Chakli. Also, they help blind people tell different coins apart. It’s a clever idea, na?