Rajnish Wattas

As the Tokyo star Mirabai Chanu bit into her long-awaited pizza after the podium moment, she was not alone. Millions of happy Indian hearts, too, had a taste of her sweet succulent success. As she raised the bar on 202 kg weights, a big load lifted not only from her slender shoulders, but also from the pining aspirations of millions of cheering Indians, hungry for that long elusive silver. We not only had our hearts in our mouths, but also savoured every morsel of Mirabai’s glory!

Impromptu pizza parties were the flavour of the day, with friends and families joining in to celebrate the Manipur girl’s success. While she munched gleefully on even more pizzas with minister Kiren Rijiju on return to India, social media, too, bit deep into the mouth-watering moment, and the Twitter posts went viral. But no one grudged the pizza party — including those from the Opposition benches.

The global giants not to be left behind on the pizza platform, prompted a company to announce life-long supply of free pizzas for the tiny wizard of weights from Manipur. Many more endorsements are sure to follow and hopefully beyond food.

Similarly, PV Sindhu, the ace shuttler in her phone chat with Prime Minister Modi, confessed to drooling over ice-creams, while observing the austerities and rigour of preparing for the global glory. Now that the silver medal is dangling brilliantly from the golden girl’s neck, she is surely to take up on the PM’s invite to the promised ice-cream party. Hopefully, other craving political parties will not melt or wilt under the media glare, and come up with their own innovative food invites, throwing open the party to fans, too.

Not expecting invites from Rijiju or Modi, I have been ordering rounds of home deliveries of pizzas and ice-creams on my own, in keeping with the chosen foods of our Tokyo triumphs. In my scheme of fitness, food follows the heart, and not the other way round. Though if I wish to still step into my pre-pandemic pants, my own personal podium moment lies in losing a few kilos.

I can relate to the deprivations of our Tokyo braves in keeping their mouths shut, while passing by tempting food counters. After turning a deaf ear to my dietician wife’s daily admonishments on losing weight, the annual medical reports became my ‘wild card’ alerts, forecasting possible health hurricanes. With all single malts locked up and butter chickens flown from the dining table, it was no less than preparing for my own personal Olympics. Mercifully, unlike Sindhu’s ex-coach Pullela Gopichand, my phone was not taken away by my home-grown coach — the good wife.

While I prefer to measure improvements on nano scale as the true measure of man, the good ‘coach’ has stood her ground on the BMI benchmark.

But today is not a day for benchmarks. Take a bow, young ladies, and indulge in more of pizzas and ice-creams. You have earned every bite.