Life and its moments

Last week, I went to my home town in Chandannagore on the occassion of my brother's marriage. As mentioned in my earlier blogs, this small sleepy town near Calcutta is where I spent the initial days of my life and had been there until I relocated to Bangalore for professional reasons.

On my way home from airport, the driver took a short-cut road through some village-like areas. The roads were narrow, mostly peppered with pot holes. There were bushes and hedges on both sides of the road. There were ponds that nurtured green water, thanks to the water-hyacinth and other phyto-planktons. There were some brick house with stains on the wall. Some huts were of mud. People either walked or were on cycle. When the car passed, they were almost pushed to the edge or out of the road. There were some ladies carrying vegetables in baskets on their head. Some workers who toiled under the scorching sun took some break in between to quench their thirst. The driver honked its way through the village. I watched some children play cricket, with bat made out of wooden planks and the wicket with bricks stacked one on top of the other.There was fresh oxygen in the air.Both sides of the road had abundance of green, be it in the form of the mangrove, the bamboo shoots or some unknown wild plants.

Few years back, I might have cycled though these roads and hardly noticed these activities. Then, I didnt find any reason to stop by the pond just to take glimpse of children swimming and playing in the "green" ponds. It was my daily sight. And I took all of these for granted. But today, I do. Today, things have changed; time has changed. In Bangalore I do not get to see these. I started appreciating the beauty of the raw nature here, the beauty of the green trees and the hedge-surrounded ponds, the unsophisticated life of the people here...

All these taught me a lesson. It is about expectations and taking things for granted or not. I realised that we lose most of the fun in life by taking good things for granted (thinking they are how things should be) and cribbing for the bad ones. As long as I stayed here and took my home-town and all that it had for granted, I failed to appreciate the good things that were lying here for decades. When we start taking things for granted, we fail to realise that every moment of our life is a gift of GOD and consequently stop enjoying life.

When I left India to study in UK, I realised some of the great things that India can offer. Before that I took all the good things of my country for granted and blamed her for all the bad ones.
We take independence and freedom for granted. Ask the Egyptians and the Libyans and people of such countries. Then we will realise how privileged we are.
We take relationships for granted, most of all perhaps our parents. Once they have reared us, we leave them onto themselves and get busy with our lives. Ask those orphans who are deprived of them and their unconditional love.
We ,sometimes, take our partners for granted. Ask the widow and the widower how they miss their good old days, when they were together.
The water that gushes into the commode every time I press the flush button in my toilet may be the water that some families in some parts of the world use for 4-5 days.

Commuting by flight, logging onto my laptop and then hooking onto the wi-fi in my own home in Bangalore and then writing another blog may be something that I would hardly have paid attention to, something for which I would have hardly thought of thanking GOD. But that twenty minutes of short-cut that my driver took made a world of difference to my world.