Every Day Hero – Episode 2

Look around and you will see a hero in each one and in you, the entire life doesn’t have be heroic, there are many instances in which you will catch a glimpse of a hero or be one. It does need courage and guts to overcome a challenge, kick the glass bubble of comfort, break out of a limiting belief, step out of the ordinary, show compassion and touch lives simply by getting connected to the luminosity within.

Today I salute the hero in my grandmother, my dadi. A beautiful woman she served many years of her life as a nurse with my grandfather who was a Doctor. I always knew her as a loving granny bent over her sewing machine and magically creating frilly frocks for me that I would wear proudly and prance around.

I was born the year after my dadu passed on. For a very long time I just knew that he was hit by a taxi while crossing the road and did not survive. What I did not know was the incomparable courage my dadi had displayed in the hospital. She must have been in her early 60s when this accident occurred in Delhi.

While crossing the road, dada ji was hit by a taxi and the taxi guy took them to the hospital. It was a mayhem around with the doctors rushing in cause dada ji was hit seriously. Amma ji (as I called my dadi) realized that her husband is not going to survive this and told the taxi driver to escape cause if her sons reach the hospital they will thrash the driver and if the police does his life will be a mess. He had told amma ji about his little kids and was pleading her to forgive him. She literally told him, “yahan main dekh rahi hun, tu bhaag ja.”

Looking back I realize the large heartedness and compassion that the lady displayed in the time of her extreme distress. It is so difficult to even forgive your own self, yes we are our harshest critics, leave alone any other. For me she is a hero in this incident. Yes she is.

As if Today is the Only Day

This year I was seeing my brother after a gap of 2 years. We fight, we scream, hell we even break each others’ hearts and that’s beside the point na. love for a sibling is so much more larger than all the petty stuff. It just IS.

However he was here in delhi only for 2 nights and all I got with him was 2 days and 1 night. And to say that we lived it up is an understatement. We maxed out each moment, laughing, sharing banter, him playing cricket with my son, enduring my uncontrolled beer giggles, we shopped, we ate and thankfully we gave fighting a miss. What stayed with me is the way we made the most of it in just about 2 days, we were truly present to each other and made it large. When I go visit Canada, I usually go for a month and we do all these fun things and everything in between, all the while thinking there is a lot of time and that time flies off and sometimes leaves me wondering how it did? And sometimes even unfulfilled with feelings like wish we had more time, wish we had done this and that. You know a bit incomplete kind of.

And I am thinking how amazing would it be if we approach all our days like this? Not like we have loads of time but as if we were in “no time” (not less time). How amazing would that experience be? How much power will the Now have? How much life would be infuse in our days? What all will be possible at all levels of our days and relationships?

As the Sun Sets

I am an eternal lover of sunsets, and my love for them grows each time I am immersed in watching them. And if the setting is a beach or mountain, I am overjoyed. On my vacation to the hills this year, every evening I religiously grabbed my balcony seat to watch the amazing show put up by the Sun. The setting is always gorgeous (for lack of a deeper word) and its various hues, wash the sky with myriad colours from the palette, that if a painting was replicated on the canvas, it will seem unreal. The molten orange against various shades of blue, mixing with white fluffy frothy white clouds deepening them with an aura of orange and then slowly disappearing right in front of your eyes is a showstopper. Add a couple of tall standing deodars as a background and majestic hills as mute witnesses giving me company and you have a unbeatable show.

No camera can do justice to its unmatched beauty, though I am trigger happy and clicked various pictures. However, the last evening there filled me with some sadness. And while in a convo with my husband I told him, “Oh! there will be no show tomorrow” and immediately it hit me that of course there will be a show, only I won’t be present at that spot to watch it. Ah! the reminder of mortality and the “show must go on”, is achingly beautiful.

The song playing in my head is yeh zindagi ke mele…duniya mai kam na hoge…afsos hum na honge ….