A Week that Quite Wasn’t

That is how the week that went by turned out to be.  Many things were not what or how I would have liked them to be.  

To start with, the rains washed away much of the fun and frolic that we siblings had plotted with our families and children for Deepavali.  We threw disappointed looks at the bag of  crackers that we had selected carefully and with great anticipation and then looked balefully at the wet and cloudy skies outside my brother's balcony.  We swore and protested at the rains that we considered so untimely.  We cursed our luck.

And then we thought of the worse misery that the rains may have wrought on the less fortunate people in our society and our own disappointment looked trivial if not ridiculous.  After all, we were all safe in the confines of our homes, stuffing ourselves with food that was well beyond safety levels.  That was a lot to thank God for.

And then arrived the text message that triggered my earlier post wherein I brought the curtain down on one other recent chapter of my life.  Calling curtains on something that I was looking forward to with a sense of anticipation isn’t pleasurable even for someone as pragmatic and occasionally unfeeling fellow like me.  But then on objective reflection I felt that it was my doing after all – both the setting up and unwinding of the expectations.  None of the people involved expected it from me, much less demanded it.  They probably did not mind or care either way.

And then came the final straw – the episode that made me withdraw from teaching a class that seemed to be going reasonably well.  A student committed an infraction that to me appeared inexcusable.  As I thought about its fallouts I came to what appeared to be a cold and practical decision to request a colleague of mine to run the rest of the course in my place. 

The incident caused me tremendous agony.  First was the pain of coming to the decision to abstain from the class.  And then came the even more difficult part of informing the class and the various internal administrative units about the decision.  Not to mention the awkwardness of explaining my angst to all concerned, including the colleague I was requesting to take my place.  And the realization that I was perhaps being the affected party here for a mistake that someone else committed, in spite of all the effort  that I had put into the course this far.

To top it all, this crisis was precipitated a few hours before I was to turn fifty six.

Who do I have to blame for this? I am not sure.  Lakshmi, my wife, who has always seemed to think I could never do anything wrong, seemed to think I should have ignored the student’s mistake.  I am not sure I could have turned a blind eye to the episode.  But I do realise at the end that painful consequences are nothing but the other side of tough choices we make.

Looking back it appears that in short, most of the time, what we make of life, seems to depend on how we look at it.  What the week was or was not is just a question of the filter that you choose to wear over your eyes.  That is a hackneyed explanation I guess.  But one that is good enough as long as it helps one come to terms with the minor tribulations of life.

Nanni….Namaskaram…