Fatum

The Chinese movie that I saw the other day brought to fore what has been my most coveted dream for the past 7 years. A little kid loses his dad, and this godsend alien uses all his powers to bring him back to life. The next day the kid wakes up to find his dad lying next to him. And then, they live happily ever after.

The bad part – as one of my close friends has recently noted in her blog – is that life is not a movie. It takes its tax from any and everyone who walks by its lanes. To some the tax is high, to the other it’s a smooth sail... but it’s there all the same. Life has its own ways of beating the metal plain, of shaping the wire straight by twisting and twirling it. Only sometimes, those twists and twirls turn out to be quite painful.

When I was growing up, my mom used to tell me about this famous song by Tagore, “Jodi tyor dak sunay keo na asay”. And that pretty much shaped my adult life. To walk alone on my convictions when nobody else believed in me has been my definition of strength. And I stand by that in the darkest of hours in my life.

It’s not as if I have always been right. I have paid the price – sometimes unusually high. But eventually the wins and losses have evened out. Lost all my friends to find them come back one day and tell me that I was right. Walked past an opportunity to later find it was a trap. In the end, so to say, I have lived on. I do not know by the end of my life what I would think of all these decisions that I have taken. But whatever I would do, I would know that I took my decisions on my own, based on the situation that was given to me - for better or for worse.

The Greeks did not write obituaries. They just asked one question when someone died – “did he have passion?” If we have to live life in harmony with the universe, we must all possess a powerful faith on what the ancients used to call fatum. And what we currently refer to as “destiny”.