WISHING YOU & FAMILY A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2021
PERSONAL REFLECTIONS: OTS, Madras (Officers Training School, Madras, now, Officers Training Academy, Chennai). Sometime in Dec. 1963. Suddenly the atmosphere in OTS, where I am training to be an officer in Indian army, is electrified. Our passing out parade has been fixed for 2 Feb. 1964. For other GCs ('Gentlemen cadets' as trainee officers are called at the academy during training), it was a landmark day but for me it had another significance too. 2 Feb. happened to be my Birthday too. I would be exactly twenty years old on that fateful day.
Today, 31.12.2020. It all seems, the mid-morning of life. How and where fifty six years (1964-2020) have gone, is simply impossible to comprehend. Time has it’s own way, moving quickly, unknowingly, catching you unaware. I was young, full of energy & ambitious. I got married and embarked on a new life with my soul-mate, had children. They studied, married and became independent. I am seventy six years now.
I wonder where all the years have gone. I know I have lived them and lived them well. But before I knew, DUSK of life has come. It seems to have come ‘so soon’. How it got here so fast, caught me by surprise? Where did my youth and middle age go? From mid-morning, straightaway dusk seems to have come and it has come so fast, it is difficult to comprehend. During my younger days, I remember seeing older people but ‘old age’ seemed so far away and something which only happened to others.
THOSE WERE THE DAYS, I THOUGHT, WOULD NEVER END.
Now, my friends, those young handsome guys full of energy and appetite, are retiring, getting grey, losing both energy and appetite. They move much slower now. They are not what I remember them to be, young, handsome, energetic, fast moving. Their age too is beginning to show. They look older, tired, hair thinning, skin sagging, eyesight getting weak, body resistance lowering, some part of body always aching when they get up.
Now, I am also just like those older people I thought, I would never be. I remember my grandfather who walked with a drooping posture with a stick, with wrinkled face, white hair. I never really believed, he was like us only, once upon a while. I remember an old English song of our times “Those were the days my friend I thought would never end”.
And Remember: NEVER REGRET GROWING OLD. IT IS A PRIVILEGE DENIED TO MANY.
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