My Encounter With An Autowallah

The sun went down but the traffic curbs were still on and this is an usual sight across my city and it environs….the week was appearing on the horizon, the skies turned dark and it poured across the twin cities till dusk. The camaraderie and sorority between them is effective…. However, today the reason for me to blog is something entirely different and perhaps I can bluntly proclaim that this is not my style of usual blogging. Given said and done, there are lot more things to blog about but I would certainly like to express my views about my encounter with an auto driver today.

As I stay very far from office I need to change couple of transportation modes to reach my home. Although I refrain taking auto for pretty clear reasons, as I was in extreme hurry today, I thought of giving auto a try after 3 long years. So I waived my hand and an autowallah came to me. As usual his first statement was the auto meter is not working so he started by asking how much can I offer. In my mind, I always knew that he is lying and helplessly I said certain amount and he tried to negotiate it to twice of it. As I was in hurry I had to agree but I ended the deal with a statement that with this amount I could go triple of the distance with AC "ON" in couple of cab services across the city.  Like always these cowards, anonymous afraid to be true to expression started abusing his competitors and finally ended up on a fight with me.

I knew that the auto driver is either upset with his inability to cope up with the competitive world or might be feeing low with himself.

I have something else to blog but I will blog this first…. Sometimes there is an oversight, this city is expanding so much with each day that it requires different means of transport so there is a constraint….so first of all autowallah’s  should never project that if we are not considering them then, that means its just an administrative omission and this is just one part of my discussion…... this auto driver don’t know anything nor has any desire to learn. I could say this so manifestly because he was showing no interest even to understand what kind of competition is there is the market and on the top of it he was just badmouthing others and trying to teach me. I was indeed disturbed and in fact I never get angry on such people whom I do not even know…as I believe that anger is an expression that you gift yourself on whose love you trust.

Basically, i don’t get angry even with people whom I knew since years because I never feel secure with them that I can get angry with them and still continue our friendship and there are few friends of mine whom I knew just few years back and I don’t even hesitate to slap them if I have to because I know they understand it as my expression of love for them and I am sure because I slapped they will never leave me and there I will take that freedom even to slap. so there are few people whom I have given this freedom to push them because I know they trust my love for them and vice versa.

Well, again the reason behind the blog is about all those insecure auto drivers. I am not upset because he fought with me or used abusive language in front of me. But rather, I feel that anything that is a part of your life or that stumbles across your ways should make you peaceful. It should not become part of your life and become source of disturbance in your life…why at all add anything to your life which being a part of your life becomes source of disturbance to you? The Auto business being in this autowallah’s life will make sense if it brings peace and growth to him. If this is going to be source of disturbance to him, then probably he should drop this from his life objectively. Even if this is some concept of religion or god, anything that comes into your life should make you peaceful…nothing should stay in your life and continue as source of disturbance. If this business is making him sometimes feel on the top of the world and some times leaves him dejected like today, then this is not at all required in his life.

I sincerely believe that one should put our peace above anything else. Any gain at the loss of your peace is no gain at all…I don’t think we should hold on/anchor to anything if it is not an eternal peace of growth to us. Nothing deserves to be a part of our life and take away our peace…..

Same is the case with this auto driver, when I said to him about how his competitors are considering their job as craft and innovating newer and better things with each day, this autowallah was asking me to give a break. I was only trying to help him….. What pains me is why is he making himself ugly with all these expressions! Lot of thoughts floated in my mind like, even if I wontedly provoking him, why is he becoming ugly in entire process…. why he have to get nasty…why don’t he remain beautiful and try to learn if possible? why should anything be ugly in the world become an excuse for you to become ugly…let something be wrong in the world..you remain right, why are you becoming wrong?

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And the upcoming innovative methods work, they are transparent….and they will capture the entire market…they are working not because they want endorsement of one or two. They are working because they want this lifestyle to change…. make this world free of corruption….

My anger is a social anger…which is on me. because I feel like a failure that my fellow beings don’t have feeling of thankfulness. Rape is happening everywhere and no one is doing anything about it, if you go to spiritual ashram, there the swami is sleeping with the seeker…where do I send my daughter to???

 If you don’t transcend body you cannot transcend your mind and if you cannot transcend your mind you cannot transcend your inner agitation and if you don’t transcend your emotional inner agitation you cannot experience silence….so my anger is that my fellow beings cannot understand how to transcend their emotional inner agitations, so when can they understand what is silence?

 Signing Off...

Aditya Telidevara

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Barfi

My Dearest Barfi,

  

Its July 20th, 2016, 5:42 AM and  this day is very very special to us as I write this message to you. A candle flickers. Susheela garu’s  beautiful song Laali-laali plays softly in my head-phones but this time….perhaps this ONLY time making me astir and awakened. The people I love most are sleeping. This morning's coffee prepared by your mom is as amazing as she is. “Ramdas”, your pet Bird is staring at me, “Candy”, your pet dog is looking at me with a boiled egg face. Flowers bloom in our back garden. Lush green trees rise up high, in natural tribute to the awakening skies above. And my heart and mind is ruminating over the past one year and this day. i am sitting at the balcony at your grandpa’s place, simply savoring the sweetness in this most simple scene….i call this the “Perfect Moment”.

Barfi, I‘ll never forget the first day we brought you home from the hospital. You were so teeny tiny little kitty remember? I was afraid to even hold you and to get you out of the car seat… I was panicking about walking you up the stairs to your room… your mom was so terrified to be left unsupervised and i was even so much afraid to carry you for 1 full minute. After your arrival,  I sure had no idea what I was doing or what being a dad truly meant. My! How quickly things have changed.With each new day it was like passing milestone, I would say, “OH! You are carbon copy of mom, and the very next moment you started looking like me This” Then I would find myself saying the exact same thing the next day. And the next. And the week after that. I quickly learned that each day is better than the day before when you’re around. You learned to laugh, and I learned that your giggle is my new favorite sound in life…Trust me barfi, your every giggle filled LIFE into me.  You learned to say “baba” + “ammmmmaaa”. Then you learned to say “tata” + “bammaa”+”atthhaaa” and finally “nhaaannaa” and then I learned you are one smart cookie :) and i was loving your every phase of your development. But there is one thing which remained same in you since your day 0 on this mother earth..do you want to now what it is? Ok, let me tell you that, you never required any lullaby song for you to sleep…..and you used to and still sing your own lullaby song when you are sleepy….this is one of the many cutest things in you 

You learned to roll over, to crawl, to sit up, to take your first steps, and I suddenly learned that you wouldn’t stay a baby forever…one day your mom suddenly became muffled that you are no more infant and became toddler and that day i reallized how quickly  you are evolving:), You learned to push doors + open drawers, and I learned that nothing could ever get in your way. You’re surely on a mission.You learned to push your little scooter gifted by your ammamma everywhere, go places by yourself, and I learned to stop chasing you, learned to let you go. …..but let me tell  you, i just couldn’t see you so independent, yet always find a way back into my arms.……That’s alright! No matter how many candles you blow, for me  in my heart my baby you will always be.Each day I watch you learn + explore the world around you + I find myself getting excited about the simple joys in life again.The love you have for the wind……The way you gaze at lights…How you light up when you see a candy…Your need to knock every door …and of course Your obsession with my mac pro laptop and iPhones…Your intrigue at whatever mom’s eating….Enjoying the little things with you was been the bestest.. I’ve learned to see the world through your eyes & suddenly, everything is even more amazing.

I shown you mom’s iPad, and you crawled straight into it, fearless, with purpose. and shown me a feature which i didn’t even knew it exists…You are a total gadget-babe, just like your beautiful mom…yes “beautiful-mom”…this is how i always describe her :),  That’s why your mom calls you iBarfi . You love the gadgets so much, since day zero.You love playing “pick a boo”. You will look me in the eye, grab the closest pillow or blanky you can find, cover your face with it, hold still for a second, then remove it really quick, and surprise me with the biggest giggle. Where is Barfi?? There is Barfi!!!

You love to kidnap our phones & pretend to talk on it. Alooooo!!! You love your ammamma and tata, your best friends and the greatest baby sitter of all time. It’s the only time you ignore us. i am sure your mom  gladly use this moment to sit by the sidelines + catch her breath + play her games in iPad.Oh! And you LOVE music. You dance + hum anytime you hear it. For the record, you’ve never been a great sleeper. You have too much to look at…Yeah. Bedtime has been difficult. I just try to remember how hard it must be to be for you, being so new in this world, thought most of the time I wish you would just fall asleep already for 8 hours straight.

Then it dawns on me that one day you won’t want me playing hours together and entertaining you. And that day, I’ll long for the nights I used to rub your little back to help you fall asleep. But mostly, I will miss &  have I told you how stunningly beautiful you are? Your Minnie Mouse lashes + gorgeous dark black hair have, literally, stopped strangers in their tracks. (What a beautiful baby!)But even more mesmerizing than your looks, is the beauty of your personality. It amazes everyone that meets you. Wherever we are, you wave + throw kisses + give high fives + clap your hands, as if you were part of the welcoming committee. Everyone wants to be around you. It’s a pull. You’ve got it.

I am so grateful that you chose me to be your dad Aditri. You know I asked for you too, right? Amma + I both did. We wished for you… dreamed about you… waited our whole lives for you. You are our bucket list. I want you to know that. You’re like a lil’ performance enhancing happy hippo pill.

I hope when you’re able to read this letter, years down the road, you will smile, and know that the day you were born was the happiest day of my life. And my first year as a dad my greatest adventure!

Happy 1st b-day sweetheart! I send you my best. 

Bye Barfi,

Your dad & I love you very VERY much.

Love Happens Just Once….:

Couple of days back, for no reason, I had a long morning walk, visited the roads/temples/parks pertaining to my old memories. Well, Delhi is a kind of place where the pollution at times rise so high that walking out to even get the mail would make a person feel as if he needed a shower. While I was walking, I was just thinking about these thirty years of my life. Yes… “Thirty” full years, , I think sometimes, and despite my own acceptance of my age, it still amazes me that I haven’t been warm since quite a sometime. Life especially is not easy to explain and I feel may be a person can get used to anything if given enough time. It was never the rip roaring spectacular stuff, I fancied it would be, but neither have I burrowed around with the gophers. I somehow feel that my days are spent like an old party balloon; listless, spongy and growing softer over time…….thinking all these I suddenly realized that my cell phone was missing from my pocket and I rushed back to my home all of a sudden only to realize that my cell phone was ringing continuously and someone was desperately trying to reach me.

I lifted and the phone and it was Gopi, my best buddy of college days. Gopi and myself used to hang-out together with the rest of our group for almost all the four years of our college days, but after college, somehow  I became busy and lost touch with all …., He has called me to invite for his wedding at Bengaluru and the best thing is that all old buddies are going to meet . I readily accepted and was blessedly happy inside as I can meet all my best friends at one place.

Well, with all these bundle of thoughts I have started booking ticket and getting coordinated with the rest of friends. My joy knew no boundaries and it was all mixed thoughts and feelings, I was feeling as if I was going back to my past to correct few of the mistakes I committed accidentally.  Somehow I was completely in love with that feel.

Well, finally the day has come and it was still dawn when I stepped out of the cab and walked towards the entry gate of the Delhi airport. The early morning February air was pleasantly cold.

As I was travelling to Bengaluru to attend a college friend's wedding. And as it had been four years since we graduated from the same college, this wedding was also going to be a reunion of our batch mates. But what I didn't know was that the reunion would begin much ahead of time; right in the queue in front of the airline counter.

I was almost sure it was she. Same height! Same long hair! Same complexion! Curiosity had my eyes glued to her. And then about 60-odd seconds later, when she turned, she proved me right. My ex-girlfriend stood two places ahead of me in that queue. We had never met after the college farewell.

For full five minutes my heart grew heavy and once again, my helpless heart has brought me here in a total incapacitated condition….I was trying to look at her and at the same time was trying to hide away from her and she was still busy checking her boarding ticket, and I was sure she didn’t notice me till that point of time…I have tried to stay away hiding for some more time but staying away and keeping distance did not give me a kind of good feeling.

 There is a saying that “Once the Heart decides, there is very little that the mind can do”
May be my heart has already decided to go and complete the conversation which is still incomplete and pending since few years.  those memories, which I had with her  are still incomplete ! 

Innumerous thoughts started passing through my mind…Staring at her, I was wounded and lost, in the wilderness of her heart, and I was standing next to her absolutely doing nothing, still I somehow felt I was doing everything. I never gave enough heed to it before thinking, but now I rue about it. It was a kind of torment for me. All those words written from her memories speak to me. All the passed moments ask why we parted ways like this! But, what is broken is broken -- and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.

In past I made few mistakes knowingly or unknowingly, never ever even in my thought space had I thought of seeing her..But fate has different plans for me and we kept on meeting somewhere or other! Yes this is not the first meet after our abrupt breakup but we kept on meeting inadvertently!!!
In this moment, suddenly we exchanged eye-contacts and only eye-contacts….I was longing to speak to her but she somehow escaped in the crowd..But at the back of my mind I knew she was also visiting Gopi’s wedding..

Sometimes, nostalgia is the most beautiful thing. I was never a hardcore ruminative nostalgic being, until this day which fuelled altogether a new kind of emotion into me. For some reason or for no reason, I started recollecting memories of Diya

Yes, Diya was my college sweetheart and my first love… I always believed that Love is something without which you cannot LIVE. It was my college days, when I first saw Diya..May be I don’t have the faintest idea of what I am talking about but perhaps that was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Well, she was not the prettiest of all I have seen, but  maybe I got attracted to that charm.. Slowly we grew with time; I started to know much about Diya. During one of the summer break, I missed her so very much that I had finally decided to let her know my feelings towards her and finally I invited Diya to my house and obviously all other problems followed but never had I felt so alive…I have absolutely no idea of what was going on, Diya was totally a mystery to me! Was it the kiss I wanted at that time? May be yes, I wanted more than anything on earth...but that’s disgusting to ask , at least at that point of time! So in this way, our relationship continued nicely!!

Suddenly I overheard:
This is the final boarding call for Mr. Adi .Would this passenger proceed to gate 7 immediately.
Yes! my name being called twice in the airport, waking me up from my past and I rushed towards the entry gate and rushed into the flight with my heart still searching for Diya to be somewhere in the flight

Someone perhaps rightly said “Love begins with a smile, grows with a kiss, and ends with a teardrop.”—Anonymous

Tears trickled down my eyes as soon as I took my seat in flight and silently I closed my eyes and was praying to See Diya at the reunion. Finally I have reached Bengaluru. Physically I am here but my heart is still wandering the search of my college sweetheart…I was searching everywhere from flight to luggage belt, still there is no trace of Diya. I very badly wanted to confess something to her….all of a sudden I could see my batch mates in airport waiting to pick me up but there is no presence of Diya anywhere
Is there any more “excruciation” then this? Somewhere very near by the beauty I once loved was going down her way and I was stuck back on mine. I did not know how to contact her, how to tell her that I was unable to make up that day. But it was not that easy, I guess love never is! Wish our relationship grew little further…but ironically we remained College friends forever
It’s Amazing how quickly time moves. Its yesterday I thought I loved her,. Love isn’t about preposterous little words, love is about grand gestures. Love is about going that extra mile, even if it hurts. It’s about finding courage inside you that u didn’t even know it was there. I don’t want these little things left unsaid smother me
Finally I just couldn’t withstand my emotions and asked my friends about Diya, onlyu to hear that she cancelled her trip in the last moment.  Again this time fate has enchained me and made me dumb, my eyes were moist with filled tears again and my throat started choking…I wanted to make her understand that I am still the same person  but even now I was rejected. I want to make her understand how much I love her more with each day passing by… May be Love will get you nothing but few incredible memories that u can’t ever shake.  The truth is you come into this world alone and leave it exactly the same way.

But for me “Love happens only once, the rest is just life”.

Signing off,
Adi