कालाय तस्मै नमः

Sometime in mid August 2012.

Me: Dude, I am coming to India in September. I will reach Pune on early morning of 23^rd. will be in Pune until 6^th Oct. Lets meet for a while...

Friend: Kya baat hain! Sure.. we will meet.. after how many years will you be coming to India?

Me: Well, for the first time after 33 months..

Friend: long time.. Excited to come to India?

Me: Well, not if I look at the time of travel! But of course, yes.. Will meet my parents, be at home.. plus homemade food.. Ganpati.. Have been missing Ganpati since last 2 years. fun of visarjan..Meeting good old friends.. Hangout at Boat Club.. lot of things.. I have already sent emails to friends.. asking them to plan a meet up on particular dates..

And, the conversation continues with each other discussing on how ‘satisfied’ one is with his achievements until one’s quarter life (crisis!?)

17^th September 2012: 

Time: 1 am EDT. 

I get a text from L. I read with sleepy eyes. L talks of how excited I must be as I would be going to India after quite a long time. I say to myself, ‘Yes, I am.’ But, I decide to reply when I wake up.

Around 2:00 am EDT: I get a call from my brother. He informs me with a shaky voice, ‘’Dad is suddenly unwell. We are taking him to hospital. I have called M and N and they will be reaching shortly’’. I wake up in a shock. I don’t know what to do. Gathering myself, I decide to follow my usual morning practice, open up my palms, joining them and concentrating on the 3 thick so-called heart, brain and life lines on my palms, I recite the morning hymn taught to me by my parents, seeking health, wealth and wisdom from the different forms of Almighty. Somewhere, I hope, let this morning prayer give as much health as possible to my father. He is more in need of it than me. I call another friend and inform him of the emergency. I get an update from M that my family is in ambulance. I just hope and pray for things to get better and come under control. What else can I do sitting 9000 miles away? I decide to iron my office wear because irrespective of the outcome of emergency back home in India, I have to report to work to take care of an important assignment due that day. I start preparing coffee for myself and reply to my friend who had texted, telling ‘Excited? I don’t know. Dad is being hospitalized.’  I taste the lukewarm coffee. It is bitter than usual. ‘Should I be taking this as an omen’, I tend to think. Ignoring the temporary bitterness of the coffee, I call M to get an update. Dad is in ER. I try to recreate scenarios in my mind of how my mom, brother and friend would have managed to face this emergency and get shivers which I cannot forget even today. In few minutes, my brother calls me up informing me of father’s demise. It must be 2:30am in Detroit. It is dark outside. A life, very dear to me, has come to an end!

How topsy-turvy things can become in a matter of 90 minutes! A text from a friend and I do feel excited in the middle of sleep about the upcoming India trip. An hour later, a disturbing phone call upsets me. Half an hour after the phone call, the previous excitement turns into an everlasting bereavement. Who could have possibly thought I would be coming to India under these circumstances? My immediate family, or my friends to whom I had emailed about a small get together, or my closest friends for whom I had bought gifts and had hoped to see their excitement when I would hand over their gifts to them, or the deceased who until a day before the aforementioned fateful event had said, ’I will be seeing my Mayur in a week’. Who? None. I had never imagined in my wildest dreams that the first time I will be going to India from US, it will be to perform final rites of my beloved dad, that too, a week before my scheduled trip. But, one omnipotent entity knew everything and had different plans for me.  

It exists, but you can’t see it. It keeps slipping out of your hands. It never stops and makes you chase it for you to wisely use it. We think we are using it but, in a way, we waste it more than we use it. And, we waste it on inconsequential things in our life. Material possessions, which in the end, do not make a slightest difference to what you had when you were born. Still, we chase them for an ephemeral joy. Of course, I am talking about ‘TIME’. 

We all may have heard about importance of time management. In school, we may have solved riddles like what has 3 hands but no face and proudly answered ‘A clock!’ We may have also read those lines which talk about importance of 1 ms, 1 sec, 1 min and so on. We may have heard Billie Joe Armstrong strum ‘Time grabs you by the wrist directs you where to go’and Linkin Park explain ‘The clock ticks life away’ in ‘In the End’. We may have heard about Steve Jobs stressing on our time being limited and not waste it. I am unsure how many of these mentioned before and many alike actually explain how TIME could be. I believe the experiences which come with Vedic quote: ‘कालाय तस्मै नमः’, which means, ‘Salutations to that great entity called TIME’ might very well be the quote explaining the power of it.

What is the best thing that happens to you? What is the worst thing that happens to you? Well, they are not things or events. I have started to believe it is the TIME that happens to you. Good or bad, it is all in the hands of TIME to show you it’s either side. What is the best way to heal a wound? Someone has wisely said that time heals everything. Do you believe that God exists? Till date, I used to believe in the existence of God. But, while flying back from India, I was thinking about the turn of events in my life and it dawned upon me, couldn’t it be possible for TIME, which has been in existence since times immemorial, to manifest itself into different forms which people today worship as god? Or, just like an organizational hierarchy, could it not be possible for TIME to be the ultimate boss? Could not luck, fate, destiny be the marionettes controlled by TIME? Well, only TIME knows it. And, only TIME can tell it.

There are few things which science cannot explain. I know this sounds a cliché. But, could it be related to the unexplored mystery of TIME? On 16^th September, I read the above Vedic quote (कालाय तस्मै नमः) in a newspaper. I immediately copy pasted the quote as my GTalk status message. I still do not know what exactly made me do that. And, the unfortunate event I faced on 17^th. I just cannot call it as a coincidence. Though it does not completely justify the existence of a greater power, it certainly makes it difficult to deny it.

Someone has rightly said, TIME, is the greatest teacher, unfortunately, it kills all its pupils.

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