Today is the 52nd birthday of my best friend whom I lost 26 years ago. We grew up together in the same village and we were together in our school and college days as well. He was exceptional. He excelled in studies, sports and several extra-curricular activities during our student days. He was always at the top. As a teenager, he wrote poems, lyrics, stories….even attempted to write a novel – all with signs of maturity. He could compose tunes for his own lyrics. He had an amazing leadership quality. He was a student of economics but he studied philosophy, psychology and literature more seriously. He prepared for the IAS. Clicked in the preliminary test. We knew that he would succeed. But, all of a sudden he left for an undisclosed destination. Later on, we discovered him in Pondicherry where he used to spend hours sitting on the sea-shore, alone and silently. We persuaded him to be back among us. He obliged but he also obliged the call of his inner-voice. He came back home but spend prolonged hours, days and weeks in secluded places…on the banks of the nearby rivers and hillocks. He disclosed that he would be a writer and nothing else. Along with some of his friends like me, he set up a cultural forum and named it as “Samskriti”. His vision was to carry on a number of campaigns in the field of culture and literature. This friend of mine was the first to show me the light of life. While I could never dream beyond being a clerk and getting married as soon as I am employed to support the traditional middle-class family as the eldest child to my parents, he constantly prompted me to be “different”. He forced me - the fickle teenager who loved to live life as a mere timepass - to stop gossiping and to read books like Lala Har Dayal’s Hints for Self-Culture (that tells why one should read all branches of knowledge), Hermann Hesse’s Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina……and many more. He knew that I was skipping classes in the college for cinema. So he managed to shift my madness for the run-of-the-mill coloured movies towards the black and white movies of Balraj Sahani and Meena Kumari era. When I studied film appreciation at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune and started writing on cinema, I realized that it was his timely tactic that brought me closer to the best of cinema of the world later on. He encouraged me to enter broadcast journalism (Radio was our most favourite then) and discouraged me to marry. When I confessed to him that I am an ordinary young man with ordinary dreams and not an extra-ordinary soul and talent like him, he had answered, “You may not be great in future but you can certainly be someone”. He helped me to hope and to be different....He was my spiritual guru and guide after my father. If I am a writer, a cultural activist and founder of the 24-years-old Samskritiki cultural society today, I owe much to my friend’s influence on the formative years of my life. I HAVE NOT LOST MY FRIEND, BUT HIS FRIENDSHIP. HE IS HERE ON THIS EARTH TODAY, LIKE YOU AND ME. BUT, I LOST HIM WHEN HE LEFT ME 26 YEARS AGO TO BE “ORDINARY”. One fine morning, I woke up to find that he has left our rented house along with all his writings that I had carefully preserved. Thereafter, I kept hearing all the strange news of him that I refused to believe easily. Like the protagonist in “Siddharth”, he entered business, got married, had children……he preferred to live a very very ordinary life – for reasons ONLY known to him. But, he did not do what he was born to do – write, think, meditate, act and lead others’ towards light of life! It has been my longest wait – nearly three decades - to see him back in the life he loved and certainly deserved. As a true friend and as a disciple, I have been carrying forward what he had envisioned one day - Samskriti – a campaign for culture. On his birthday every year, I remember him fondly and I pray for his return to his original path of life extra-ordinary. And I remind myself that I won’t halt the mission of my most beloved friend till I am alive.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 11:51:55 +0000
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