And it was not in his nature to accept this cheerfully. He was a martial artist for a reason. He had not traveled halfway around the world to the holy city of his ancestors and joined an ancient akhara just to get his ass kicked. Many were the days he limped home and watched old martial arts videos as a balm to his wounded feelings. The oldest trope of all was that the new guy had to patiently endure a period of humble apprenticeship and even outright suffering before emerging in the final reel as a transcendent ass-kicker. Of course, in movies that was all compressed into a training montage that lasted a few minutes, whereas Laks was having to actually experience it in real time, no fast-forward button available. For a while he just had to suck it up. But as time went on he began to resist, to make it a little more challenging for his training partners. If they complained, he would tell them in his gradually improving Punjabi that his only motive was to be honest, to make them better wrestlers. They could grumble, but not argue.