The Big Change

If your life ever becomes a mess and goes out of your control, one of the few options you are left with is to leave the environment. Leaving the familiar territory and taking a leap into the apparent darkness that lies ahead calls for something more than frustration. It requires boldness. Boldness to face new challenges when you are
already beaten down by old ones!

The year was 2001 and the place was Shillong. I was 41 years old and working as a lecturer in a reputed college in the town. There was a curious mixture of factors that
had thrown my personal life into utter chaos. Immaturity, inability to deal with the society, inadequate understanding of myself, some futile illusory quests... The list was pretty long, long enough to bog me down utterly.

When you are down and out, Newton’s law on momentum and acceleration attaches itself to you with unflinching fidelity and your downward cruise becomes irreversible. The society is more than happy to add its bit by giving you an additional shove as you move down the slippery slope. Every society loves its beaten denizens. The beaten are a symbol of what the successful are happily not. The joy of the successful multiplies in direct proportion to each one’s debilities or complexes on seeing the dereliction of the fallen people.

The slope of the derelict is usually rendered a one-way traffic by the gravitational pull of both the fall of the beaten and the fascination with which the fall is watched by the
society.

I was fortunate enough to be visited by an epiphany. “Miracles happen every day” was inscribed in very big letters on the wall outside the Loreto school. As I rode by it one day a question arose in me: what miracle can I make happen to me? The answer didn’t take long to come. I wrote my resignation letter and met the Principal of the college.

Was it a bold decision? Or was it made out of sheer frustration? Was it both?
Perhaps, it was all these and more. A month later my wife and I, both unemployed, found ourselves in Delhi. I must admit that my brother-in-law had extended a warm invitation to us already along with an assurance: “Delhi can offer jobs to anyone who has the skills and the inclination to use them.”

One of the many lessons that Delhi has taught me is that it is cosmopolitan enough to welcome anyone, the darkness that hides in certain alleys and byways notwithstanding. Delhi continued to teach me numerous valuable lessons of life none of which I would have learned in the previous place in all probability. Delhi made a man of me by revealing the divine and the diabolic dimensions of humanity. I watched the essence of humanity on the roads and kerbs of Delhi. Live human bodies that huddled en masse under the flyovers or over the bridge across the Yamuna in the freezing winter nights were some of my teachers. So were the elegantly dressed upwardly mobile bodies in the malls and multiplexes. Delhi continues to teach me in more ways than I can enumerate.

Delhi was my miracle. The big change. The city that transformed me and still continues to tickle every neuron in my veins and cause occasional synaptic eruptions in my brain. In my heart too.

PS. Inspired by the #StartANewLife theme of Housing [https://housing.com/].

Comments

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below. Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita: For certain is death for the born and certain is birth for the dead; Therefore over the inevitable Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog