Prelude to AtoZ

 

From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic]

Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.”

Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way.

I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemistry of your life.

Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen blend together to form sugar. None of these elements has any sweetness and yet sugar is sweet. The chemical bond formed by these elements gives birth to that sweetness which individually none of the elements can ever have. Some people are like that: they enter your life and create sweetness.

Many people are quite the opposite. These elements which combine to form sugar can make slightly different combinations and become deadly poisons.

I have had a fair share of both: sugar and poison in life. I know I was also sugar in some people’s life and poison in the life of more perhaps. I guess life is like that. Inevitably. If only I had learnt some lessons earlier in life, I could have been more of sugar and less of poison.

I take part in Blogchatter’s AtoZ challenge every April. The challenge is to write 26 posts in April with the theme of each successive post corresponding to the 26 letters of the alphabet. Some of my previous attempts ended up becoming e-books. If you’re interested, below are the links to them and they are all free.

1. Great Books for Great Thoughts

2. Humpty Dumpty’s 10 Hats

3. Life: 24 Essays

This time, my theme for the challenge is: Friends and others – portraits. Each post will present one person who played certain significant role in my life at some time. The idea is to benefit from my hindsight. The idea is to look at certain people from as benign an angle as I possibly can so that the poison they produced in the chemical reactions of life may now be seen from a different perspective with the benefit of hindsight. Most of these people will be referred to pseudonymously. Only a handful will have their real names in the posts. And I don’t intend to tell which name is real and which is not. What’s in a name?