Sunday, March 31, 2019

The Journey

I grew up on a small street in a small town in Punjab.  The town of Patiala, known for its heritage of kings and darbaars and its classical music gharaana.  My darji (as we used to call our grandfather), was a simple man who sold vegetables in the market, sitting next to the ancient wall of the old fort.  Our home was tiny, barely ninety square yards.  The street was often flooded with drain-water when it rained heavily.  I played on the street with other kids, and went to the local temple to ring their bells in the evening.  My world was small but full of warmth and affection.  It was dinners in December, sitting on the floor in a cozy kitchen, it was the three siblings and our mother sleeping on a double bed, it was our school bicycles leaning on each other in the verandah.  My street and my home may not have been known to anyone outside Patiala, but it was the capital of my world.

I studied in an institution of prestige in the capital of India.  The chaotic capital city of Delhi, with its VIP mansions, roads named after Kings and Generals and Prime Ministers, the wide boulevards lined by embassies, and the glittering, elite environs of South Extension and Vasant Vihar.  I stayed in the institute hostel named simply Jwalamukhi (the volcano), and during the day studied the foremost contributions of the human mind of the twentieth century: Quantum Mechanics, the theory of Computation, the Calculus of limits and fields.  At times world-renowned men and women came to our campus to talk to us: the Dalai Lama, the Prime Minister of India, the founder of the Bose Corporation... We worked on computers built in Great Britain, and were taught by professors who had studied in Berkeley and Stanford.

I work near Washington DC, the center of world power.  I work for global airlines who reach all corners of this planet.  I sometimes trade in financial instruments which derive their value from the GDP projections and the future of oil supply.  Premiers and Presidents and Generals whisk past me on the road or fly above me in a helicopter.  Decisions which impact billions of people throughout the world are taken in buildings that I see in front of me.  Global trade deals are made and talked about in a hotel lobby while I sip on my coffee.  I am surrounded by people of almost all the nations of this world, speaking strange languages and dialects...  When we walk and chatter on Constitution Avenue, it fills many of us, I hope, with immense respect for that short document whose Bill of Rights has become the bedrock of human freedom.

The journey from that small street in Patiala to the power center of the free world has not changed my heart much, but it has exploded the frontiers of my mind.  I enjoyed the fairy tales of kings and princes and phantoms back then, and I perhaps understand the complexity of the human condition now.  As the train travels further and more distant from my birthplace, I long for the simple joys of my past, but am enthralled at the experiences which I could not have imagined as a child.

A journey that would have been unthinkable just a century ago is a living reality for me.  The journey has made me grateful, and humble.  I can only dream of giving back to the world a paltry extent of what it has given me.

2 comments:

HindiMovieRatings said...

Beautifully written!! Brings back so many memories!!

Anonymous said...

Loved it.