Happy birthday Papaji

Official Father’s Day is still a few weeks away- I think it’s celebrated on 21st June. But for me, this day falls today as it happens to be my father’s birthday, who would have turned 92 had he been alive!

He was the most simple person I had ever come across in my life. A self made man, I always saw him working hard with utmost sincerity and diligence. Always punctual for office, never missing office for a furlough and treating his office as a place of worship, he had to earn each penny, never receiving anything on the platter.

He amassed no wealth, met with limited professional success, hardly made any friends, had no bad habit apart from smoking a cigarette a day, which too he quit quite early in his life and hardly digressed into anything apart from going to office and coming back home to be with family. He read and wrote – nice little messages and once in a while some poetry, was fiercely nationalist and was an atheist, though God fearing.

Nothing spectacular, nothing great, yet such a lot to earn and emulate. Never hate anyone or envy his/her success or wealth was his life long motto. He cared for the most lower strata of the society and shared happiness with them in his own inimitable way. He never chased material things and was most satisfied with whatever he had.

Having enjoyed perpetual good health all his life, his old age was made painful by almost fatal accident he had! He fought back but eventually surrendered himself to cancer as he wanted to avoid painful chemotherapy in his ripe years and wanted to transit into eternity most peacefully.

A friend today wrote a most poignant blog on her mother and what I commented on her blog would be my concluding remark on this blog too – God no longer produces such specimens!

RIP Papaji, as we fondly use to call him!