Tuesday, June 06, 2017

To Today

My schoolmate’s wife died late last week. Dengue was the cause. It happened abruptly, without warning and thoughts starting flooding in as they are wont to do in these types of events. 

A bunch of my other school mates showed up for the funeral.  I hadn’t seen a few of them in many years and we bemoaned the fact that we were catching up only because of a tragic finality. 

I’ve tended to take so much for granted. There’s always the call that can wait, an email that is not responded to immediately, things not said waiting for a more opportune moment.  Unfortunately, life doesn’t subscribe to our schedule. We come into this world often with much fanfare but when we go, it’s often like a candle being snuffed out. So many words unsaid, so many plans laid to waste and you are left wondering at the futility of it all.


A few days after a death we’ll go back to our routine lives, worrying and fretting the mundane and confident that we have all this time to achieve what we’ve set out to do. I for one am not going to do that or at least consciously give my damnedest not to fall back into the fallacies I’ve been guilty of. I am going to be in touch with my close friends and family a lot more, never postpone a call or an email I’ve been sitting on. Carpe Diem is a well worn cliche, but this time the gravitas has hit home.

A wedding in Chennai

It's been a while since we had a massive wedding on the wife's side of the family. This one was especially important as it was the...