Skip to main content

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

Popular posts from this blog

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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...