Simplified Laws Guide to Taxation and Legal Concern How beautiful the weather is.
It’s been thirty years since we started walking in Lalbagh regularly, I asked myself. How quietly time has slipped by. The early Bangalore days still feel oddly fresh, as if they happened only yesterday.
In the early 1990s, I used to sit on these very rocks of Lalbagh, just before dawn, building dreams. Dreams about my wedding, what the girl should be like. Dreams about my career, what I might become. Today, I am back on the same rock. It’s early morning again. I don’t know why, but my mind decides to take a round trip across three decades.
“What next?” Amma had asked, fifteen days after my father passed away in 1987.
I was seventeen. I had no clue about the future. I didn’t even know a course called Chartered Accountancy existed. Amma was a housewife. My father’s modest pension was our only source of income. And now here I am, sitting in the heart of Bangalore, quietly wondering how I arrived here at all. It has been, I admit, a beautiful journey.
Isn’t it always like this? When life is going well, memories of past struggles surface, not with pain, but with gratitude. There is a quiet pride in having survived them.
What, then, has changed from those days to now, I asked myself
If I look inward, my values, though back then adopted unknowingly, have only deepened. Empathy and kindness have multiplied. Ego, jealousy, and crudeness have faded, some almost to extinction. Whatever the change in lifestyle or comfort, I remain grounded. And that makes me happy.
But the ecosystem around me, my people, my role models, the stalwarts I once looked up to, has changed profoundly.
One of my greatest admirers of life is ninety-seven today. Active still, but when I see him now and remember how he was thirty years ago, my heart aches.
I remember speaking to a highly influential man about twenty years ago. He showered me with affection. Without hesitation, he dialled a number, a minister in the government. Within three days, my work was done. A month ago, I met him again. I smiled. He smiled back, but he could not recall my name. Not very old, only in his sixties. Alzheimer’s is cruel like that. It renders not just the patient helpless, but everyone around them. Even if I had an issue to share today, he could not dial anyone. The same man; life had turned him upside down.
At home, we used to call another gentleman a “spring.” If he attended a function, the atmosphere instantly became lighter. He touched everyone with his warmth and manners. Always lively. Always present. When I saw him at a function a few weeks ago, a caretaker was holding his hand as he walked. Parkinson’s, I realised, doesn’t kill instantly; it slowly imprisons a living person.
It wasn’t even twenty-four hours since this rewind of memories began, and tears quietly rolled down my cheeks. I told myself umpteen times, life eshtene (life is nothing!). And yet another Monday arrives. Freshness in the sky. A list of pending tasks. New assignments. Aspirations. Do’s and don’ts for the week ahead.
I marvel at how quickly the mind adapts, reshaping itself to circumstances, knowing deep down that rich or poor, educated or illiterate, city or village, none of it truly matters in the long run.
It’s vana parva. One by one, the brothers drink water without answering the questions of a Yaksha guarding the lake, and fall dead. Finally, Yudhishthira answers the Yaksha’s question:
What is the greatest wonder in the world?
“Day after day, countless beings die,” Yudhishthira replies, “yet the living believe themselves immortal. What can be more wondrous than this?”
If even Yudhishthira could not fully decode this truth ten thousand years ago, how can an ordinary yakshachit man like me hope to?
Yes, you are right. I am back in the office now, singing the familiar chorus of routine!
But somewhere between these old rocks of Lalbagh and my desk, a quiet knowing lingers:
That life is fleeting, that memory is fragile, and that awareness, however brief, is perhaps the only real wealth we carry forward.
prasad@balakrishnaandco.com | 9845721255
