My most fantastic revelations have occurred at the most mundane situations...like when I’m brushing my teeth or making coffee or cleaning my room. And recently I realized that somehow somewhere sometime I'd let go of all the things I'd been clinging to so tenaciously for the past decade...every single thing I thought went wrong, everything I thought unfair, everything I had been forced to face and fought to deal with...didn't matter any more. And funny thing is, I wasn't as ecstatic as I thought I should be, yeah I felt positively peaceful...almost Zen like, but that's it...after 3650 ( tats allll a decade is...even tat seems insignificant) or so days of agonizing over something, I finally got over it, finally buried all the bitterness without even paying it the tribute of a funeral (which by the way, is a good thing).
So ok shit happened. Big deal. And I actually genuinely feel that way about it. No fake machismo involved ( though tat might sound a little inappropriate since i'm not a man to begin with, it expresses what I want say pretty aptly). And besides, if I had grown up the way I was growing up, I would have ended up being an unbelievably snooty, boringly smug, irritatingly picky person anyway...so everything that happened, made me a much better person than I would have been. I definitely needed a little humbling. When a catastrophe strikes it hits hard in the beginning, but when you get over it, IF you get over it, what remains of you is just those parts of you that are of any actual relevance....
I was so pathetically arrogant...about everything...how easy it was...anything...everything...whatever I wanted, I got...sometimes by luck, sometimes ability and sometimes just plain love. And I never actually stopped to feel grateful for any of it. Not grateful to anybody...just grateful for what is!...I should have been, I wasn't. The only thing i regret is that I had to watch my loved ones go through what they did before I realized how absolutely paltry the value of what I valued was.
...let me start at the beginning...from now on this post is going to belong to my father...because it is his battles that I have witnessed, and his losses I have mourned. And his strength I have admired. His early years he spent being coached in english and the mahabharata and ramayana by his grandmother ( who I might just write a post about someday!) and sitting astride someone's shoulders when his father went hunting. He still has a tiger's claw in his cupboard somewhere...that is the picture I have of my father's childhood. A tiger's claw. An old antique watch and my grandfather's picture frozen at age 39…all I know is everything my father became he already innately was. He is someone I cannot imagine losing…I have watched him teetering precariously in the most dangerous of situations…I know he will always make it. He was educated completely through scholarships, which I presume made things much easier for my grandmother who had five younger daughters to grow up, that none of them(not even my grandmother…who I like to assume was just too old to do anything) was around, when my father seemed to have lost is irrelevant…school, Rourkee and then Japan…all on the strength of his abilities. Then a few years as an engineer. And then SUNSU happened. And grew slowly to become the company it was. One of the top five in the country…that was when the family pictures were always pretty full and we received lots of complementary gifts at special occasions( funny how much of that you can get when you don’t relly need it)…the seat in his office was my favorite place to be. It was one those comfortable leather jobs with an AC right next to it…and the luxury of looking at people outside without having them look back at me. He used to stay entire nights at the factories sometimes, when shipments were being sent…all he was, all he had, he gave to nourish what he wanted to accomplish. And he did, also taking all his sisters and their husbands and their children piggybacking…hmm…come to think of it he even paid for their educations, their house rents, I even have an uncle who sold a company car, pocketed the money, I know my dad didn’t ask him for it. I loved watching their expressions when my mother reminded them of it recently when they came sniffing around after hearing he wasn’t down anymore. It all started with the delay in importing accessories…from
And now life is finally slipping into a semblance of normalcy, and like I said…I just realized…we’re all ok now.
And as far as realizations go…insanity… is only that point at which a person refuses to believe the rational, that point at which a person decides to give up trying and let circumstance guide the course of his life…so as far as this remains true, we’re all pretty safe as long as we want to be.
And if someone can live through this…they can live through a lot…which is actually a pretty great thing to know! :)
