63, Going On 18...

Another year of `borrowed time’ slips by.

Sid is off, honeymooning in Ladakh. Puja, as only she can, is doing her masti in San Francisco. So the 63^rd is bound to be low key. A few hits, some misses. C’est la vie!

Last year's cake from Marriot

Last year it was a cheesecake from Marriot. This time around, a much more modest walnut cake from the Maitri store next to the Command Canteen gets top billing. An aside to the kids - see that much is the difference you guys make to my life! Message in there somewhere? GOOD!!

Of course we’re closer to the end of the journey than the beginning, but new discoveries continue to be made. New people continue to enter your life, to enrich it.

The measure of one’s success in life is not the wealth or real estate one accumulates, but the number of lives one touches.  Take a bow, `Mitti Pao’! When I started this blog three years back, I thought I’d have a captive audience of just Puja and Siddharth. Maybe their spouses too, out of deference. But it has pleasantly surprised me.

Not only has it managed to renew old friendships, it has also made me some delightful new ones. As we grow older, we need to cherish the old and embrace the new, inhibitions be damned! What is life apart from a crateful of memories?

All in all, the fact that `Mitti Pao!’ has reached out to so many is heartwarming. When someone say they actually look forward to the next post, I must be doing something right!

At 62, last year..

The kids have lives of their own. The fact that one has given them wings is satisfaction enough. That they soar the skies is enough to warm the cockles of the heart, even if the empty nest rankles.

Be grateful for the relatively good health you enjoy. Mortality is ok, accepted in its inevitability, but what scares the daylights out of me is morbidity!

Minor hiccups are, of course, part and parcel of life. Was getting a double root canal done on the eve of my birthday. Ouch! The aim is to fit yet another bridge to span a missing molar. I have more bridges on my teeth than there are across the Hudson River in New York. My autobiography could well be titled `A Bridge Too Far’. 

I try to talk the dentist out of it. No value for money, I tell him, how long will it last? A lifetime guarantee, he assures me. True, I sigh in resignation, but just how much life is left, my friend?

In the end, one must try and live by William Ernest Henley’s motivating `Invictus’ code..

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.