Ours is the blessed generation - By Philip Mudartaha

By Philip Mudartha

By Philip Mudartha-Doha-Qatar

Bellevision Media Network

 

Doha, 26 March 2012: “Ours is the blessed generation” retorted Thomas. I had described us as a “lost generation”. Friends for decades, we were reminiscing on our journey through life. Both of us were migrants; we belonged to the milieu of young high school and college educated rural boys, who left their ancestral villages and occupations in search of jobs in cities and on foreign soil.

 

Thomas has returned to his roots in south-eastern Kerala after forty-five years. At 63, retired from his industrial employment, he has re-invented himself as an innovative agriculturist raising cash crops including rubber. He is living through fourth stage, which I will soon embark into.

 

Over mugs of tea, with Hills and rolling plains resplendent in their eternal green ensemble, we walk down memory lane and capture the essence of those twenty-some years of struggle immediately following the care-free stage. We indeed were lost yet did not give up. We did not know who we were, where we were headed, what we wanted, and where we wanted to go; yet we were on a quest. Like a ship at mid sea, without sight of the shore, without a compass, and without a guiding beam from any light-house.

 

The quest for my identity:

Mid-1973, and yet it seems like yesterday. “Who Am I?”I kept asking myself. I could not think anything else. Nothing else mattered. I was at a loss to explain the relevance of my learning: I did not figure in the list of successful candidates to be trained as a scientist by a premier national institution. What use was my topping in Advanced Physics and Mathematics? My professors were so fond of me and proud of my grasp of complex scientific concepts and abstracts of calculus that they had kept repeating with confidence of my great future as a scientist.  I tried by the only means I knew: knowledge and merit. But I lost.

 

Why did I fail? I had no answers. Except the realization that academic excellence alone does not define who I am. There is more than what meets the eye. All that Quantum Physics and Hyperbolic Integrations be damned. A network of string pullers would make or mar my identity. Without, I am an average job-seeker, knocking on doors in vain, for days, weeks and months until coming across my savior. He sure did. There is always someone out there for everyone. The paths cross, as destined shall I say, to give me an identity of an Iron-maker.

 

The quest for my love:

Reason fails in matters of heart. Love happens; blind love; puppy love; mad love. No Quantum Physics and Analytical Chemistry matter. Like faith. One either falls in love or one does not. In retrospect, crush is an appropriate description for the naiveté of first love especially when it does not lead you down the aisles to an altar. Blind faith can survive reason. But blind love does not. The social order backs blind faith but not reason; often it chooses to crucify those who challenge faith with either reason or a competing theology. Contrarily, the social order backs reason and crushes blind love. Simply put, I loved and lost.
Why did I fail? I was given the answers in a package of questions. What are you? Where did you come from? Do you know your background? How much are you making and can make? How can you make ends meet let alone keep ‘her’ happy? Do you know what a room in a Bombay slum costs? Have you any faintest idea that we do not live by love alone?

 

To be honest, I did not. I had blind faith in blind love. True love conquers everything and everyone was my gospel. I was wrong. Be practical, even in true love, only money matters. Show me the money, not your heart, honey!

 

The quest for money:

On a hot summer of 1977, after a long working day, for three paychecks I arrived at “VhodlemKood” sited in Pinto House in Byculla. In the kitchen, the last dinner meal was being served to a fat old man with a foul mouth. Little did I know that he was drunk and was I prepared for what came on him? As I ate my guest meal, paid with my own money, the man tore into my family background, my vain past glory as a star student, and my being a nobody but a frog in the well, working three stupid jobs for pittance. Shame, according to him, I would amount to nothing. Money baba, money. Go after it. Go to the gulf, where money is. Go, go, and go out of my sight!

 

I must be mad to heed advice of a drunkard. But, looking back, I admit he turned my world upside down. He shook me out of my romantic thinking that working hard and long in the city is all I would do for the rest of my life, and money would come naturally. Money did not come naturally to him. I will not be an exception.

 

The rat race never ends:

Life humbles us all. It makes men of young romantic boys. It makes us little rats racing to reach our workplace, to meet deadlines, set and achieve goals (only to see that we keep shifting the goal-post), get married and ‘settle down’ (Ah!, honey, what does it mean?) and make kids. Raise a family, build a home, bring bread and butter to the table, educate the kids, and take care of wants of siblings, elders and parents. You have seen it all, everyone without exception. Perfectly tamed into an average suburban obedient tom, dick and harry, getting up by the clock and running his life by the clock. A rat, who will do anything and everything to remain in the race, and hoping to make it to the finish line for the sake of a home, a wife, kids and a net positive bank balance.

 

“We are rats, but lucky rats” reminds Thomas. “We had everything we could hope for. We were exactly where we should be, where God intended us to be”.   I had heard of doubting Thomas’s, but my friend has not ‘lost’ his faith despite all the pain and agony of the quest for identity, love and money.

 

That is how things are put in perspective at retirement and beginning a new chapter like Thomas did. But, what did I think at the threshold to stage 3? That I think is another story.