He Who Started a Good Work
I turn 30 this weekend. How should I measure my life? My memories
and people I’ve known? Is that any less important than what might lie ahead? I measure
my life by the people I’ve known. One or two of them helped me come closer to
God.
I’m a sports reporter at a television news channel. I have a
lovely wife and a 3-year-old daughter. We are expecting our second child this
fall. We take care of my parents. My father recently retired as typesetter from
a small Hindi newspaper. He worked night shifts for years. This story is not
about him though. It’s about someone who called me “son” only once but went the
extra mile for me…. You know the Bible verse, “He who began this good work in
you, will carry it on until it is finished….” Not sure about the chapter and
verse but really like the words. Always bring to mind Anthony Sir and my days as
a junior long jump player. I didn’t go very far in the sport… just far enough
to be where I am now. Which is farther than I deserve to be, all things
considered.
Often, I pass by the lower middle class colony near Gandhi stadium in the heart of Delhi where I was born and raised. Sometimes, in dreams, when I least expect it, I’m back in my childhood. In some of them I’m taken back to my 16-year-old self. In reality I’m glad to have gotten out of those stressed times. But today, I will give anything to feel my pulse race as it used to back then… each time I saw someone leap across the long jump pit inside the stadium gates. I can do that, I would think. Images of winning… inter-zonal matches and who could say, but inter-state matches too, would rise in my mind. And each time, I would tell myself to only qualify for a sports-quota certificate… so I could go to college… at Delhi University. I was a government school boy you see and knew a thing or two about being practical. All that poverty, the straitened circumstances, being in a classroom full of kids from poor to very poor backgrounds… made you not want to aim too high yet desperate for the dizzy heights of success.
To be continued...
Often, I pass by the lower middle class colony near Gandhi stadium in the heart of Delhi where I was born and raised. Sometimes, in dreams, when I least expect it, I’m back in my childhood. In some of them I’m taken back to my 16-year-old self. In reality I’m glad to have gotten out of those stressed times. But today, I will give anything to feel my pulse race as it used to back then… each time I saw someone leap across the long jump pit inside the stadium gates. I can do that, I would think. Images of winning… inter-zonal matches and who could say, but inter-state matches too, would rise in my mind. And each time, I would tell myself to only qualify for a sports-quota certificate… so I could go to college… at Delhi University. I was a government school boy you see and knew a thing or two about being practical. All that poverty, the straitened circumstances, being in a classroom full of kids from poor to very poor backgrounds… made you not want to aim too high yet desperate for the dizzy heights of success.
To be continued...
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