The connection between racquet sports & chop-sticks

Like the fluctuating current back home in many Indian cities,my proficiency with chop-sticks keeps wavering between brilliant and bad — more the latter,I must admit. Watermelon chops I’ve aced,corn and capers in salad actually let me prolong the delusion that I was gifted in these sort of skilled things. Noodles — I’m on slippery,greasy ground as they keep slipping from my vice-grip,and short of hiding my face in the plate and pecking like a bird — licking them noodles straight off it,I’ve done every possible embarrassing manouevre in the middle. Self-coached for most part and not getting any better after a week,but finally relenting to a Chinese 17-year-old’s insistence that I at least watch and learn,I grasped a few basic.

For starters — they may look like a well-oiled unit and joint at their hips,but chop-sticks are actually two different sticks,and the wooden ones need to be broken in two,unless you intend on eating your own jammed finger-nail. Next,they are held in between the thumb and the index finger,and the smart ones always seem to operate with them parallel to the surface or 45 degrees,not perpendicular like my surgical incisions.

Like all great pianists and type-writer naturals I’ve admired,chop-stick pros use them without looking down at every muscle movement of the palm.

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A young Chinese says Generation Gaps are defined by the way chop-sticks are held. The third-finger ought to separate the two units — traditionalists and her family elders say — so as to deftly criss-cross or transform them into V-shaped tiny crane-lifters.

There’s a deeper anatomical link — I think — with deft chop-stick users also being adept at racquet-sports. Badminton,table-tennis — now you know why it comes to them so naturally. It’s all about the grip,and mine is firmly on a fork in the left-hand,a trusted,old standbye.