Cheeku,
As Gaurav says, the earth is about to complete one more round around the sun. Time flies sometime, sometimes it crawls…but we keep getting older. You are in another dimension. You remain young, the 23 year old starry eyed dreamer who thought the world must remain perpetually on fire…
The glow from that fire still warms our hearts…and each time Tubby picks up the guitar and strums, the strains of the music reveal your laughter. It resonates in the music, in our world and inside us…
Love and losing is becoming such a habit…I think the inexorable acceleration of change is constantly shifting the goal posts. At my age, as I slow down, I see everyone else accelerating. Just the other day I sat back and smiled to myself. In six years from now I would have retired from the service, after thirty seven years. Of course, there is always this audacity we live with, the belief that we shall not die even though we don’t know what awaits us the next moment! I still remember how in 1978 I had gone up to Mussoorie, a rookie-probationer, trying to learn the ropes of being an administrator. Seems like just yesterday.
Each day is like a page that I turn, and even as I near the end of the book, I am reminded of these lines of Octavio Paz:
Beautiful face
That like a daisy opens its petals to the sun
So do you
Open your face to me as I turn the page.
Love you always, Cheeku
Dad