Till death do us part!

Death may loom and sickness is a reality but in the words of Swami Vivekananda, let us “Arise, Awake and stop not till the goal is reached.” Together we shall prevail

The sad part of the Covid-19 pandemic since early last year and in a more pronounced manner, the deadly second wave that is unleashing a tsunami of fear and infections across all demographics and age segments in India is the proximity it has brought many of us to death itself.

I have myself suffered the loss of a close family member, a colleague who had just returned from a much-needed holiday and three business school classmates succumbing to the icy clutches of the Covid-19 monster, sadly, there seems to be no light yet at the end of the tunnel.

The most poignant of all these deaths was a good friend Aniruddh who I met on the first day of my post-graduate programme at National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE) Mumbai. His career took him from Mumbai to Oman to Iraq and we managed to meet many times in the last fourty years, at weddings, during a holiday in Oman and most recently, when he did a two-day break with other classmates in Pune.

Ever cheerful and a special friend to all, Aniruddh chose in the last phase of his career to serve in Erbil Iraq, a place many of us planned to visit once the pandemic ended. Sadly, the pandemic ended Anirudh’s Iraq stint and his life.

After seven weeks in a hospital in Erbil, he breathed his last after many valiant attempts to live and our last memory of him was a poem he recited for us in January which almost prophetically ended with a lovely line in Urdu that says, “let the day not merge into the evening too soon, for then I may have to leave.”

When promising lives like Aniruddh and many much younger are suddenly cut short by the unforgiving scythe of death, one remembers the great line by Adam Sternberg, “It all seemed so absurd that a life comprising so many accumulated years could be interrupted with such indifferent swiftness”, which underlines what he calls “the fundamental fragility of it all”.

Try spouting philosophy about the inevitability of death to a woman whose husband leaves home to go to a hospital and never returns; to teenagers who still need a parent to help steer the course of their lives just a little longer and most horrifying of all, to a parent who would feel the words spoken by the AK Hangal character in Bollywood’s immortal movie Sholay. After his son is brutally murdered by dacoit Gabbar Singh, the shattered father pro-claims “Duniya ka sab se bada bhoj-Baap ke kandhe par bete ka janaza”-the biggest weight of the Universe-the coffin of a son on the shoulders of a father!

And a dastardlier villain than Gabbar is surely the invisible Covid-19 virus with its bank of companions like the white and black fungus, which seem to lurk everywhere these days.

I recall that it was over a dozen years ago when the mother of a dear friend in Pune died, we had a truly empowering session with Anu Aga, a mentor and Pune’s most gentle industry thought leader. Herself a victim of a tragedy, she shared with us a philosophy of understanding and accepting death that gave us emotional shelter when my own mother died a few months later.

As Chelsea Hanson advises in his book ‘The Sudden Loss Survival Guide: Seven Essential Practices for Healing Grief’ “When the raw pain is so unbearable and unbelievable, you may wonder if you can go on. But you can and will. It’s a conscious choice to decide to move through grief, mourn the loss of the person you love, and heal.”

Heal we must, not just because that would be the right thing to do, for our work, our families and indeed for ourselves. But in these difficult times, it also becomes our responsibility to do what we can for the people of our country and city, because there are hundreds of millions who need us to be empathetic and emotionally and physically engaged in these days of great crisis.

The PPCR action in Pune led by the very passionate Sudhir Mehta, the proactive leadership of our Mayors and Commissioners and the monetary and activity support of many individuals and organisations have given us a cause to fight for.

From one crisis to the other-oxygen plants, hospital equipment, skilling of healthcare workers and now vaccine availability and jab scheduling, the citizens and non-profit institutions of Pune -Symbiosis, Lighthouse Communities, CYDA, GTT Foundation and Mukul Madhav Foundation to name just a few, have risen to the occasion and are fighting on.

What does the future hold? Patience for one, as we ensure that our own instinct to soar free and the cities’ impatience to get the flailing local and national economy on track to a still possible double-digit growth is tempered by prudence and continued attention to safety first!

Death may loom and sickness is a reality but in the words of Swami Vivekananda, let us “Arise, Awake and stop not till the goal is reached.” Together we shall prevail!