Skip to main content

Free Ticket

Saw this story recently and could not help thinking that I would not score one of those free tickets - but it would be a great to see more small public service give-aways like this one. If not a free ticket atleast a small discount or even reward points for effort. Same idea like Sweatcoin except it could be less intrusive. Little incentives like this one to make people get a bit more fit adds up when calculated across the population. 

Fitness always pays off and the Indian Railways, under its initiative to promote the culture of fitness among the people, wants you to save your hard earned money. As little as only thirty squats can get you a free platform ticket at the Anand Vihar railway station in the national capital now as part of the railways' Fit India initiative.

In a first-of-its-kind scheme, the Indian Railways has installed a squat machine at the Anand Vihar station and 30 squats in 180 seconds in front of the machine will generate a free platform ticket.

I can't see a lot of women availing this in Delhi but the idea is still meritorious. Would be interesting to see if anyone who would physically struggle to get to the finish line would bother to try or this would just be a fun thing for reasonably fit people to do. No reason why the experience cannot be gamified to create the right incentives for folks to push themselves out of their comfort zone. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...