Thank you for walking the talk with us in the continued journey of our life. You brought us many a suprise. Quite many blessings!
We enjoyed pleasant scenes and sights, people’s friendship and fellowship. People of good will reaching out without a thought of caste, colour or creed!
We inched towards a little more mature way of looking at life and events around us. The struggles and pains of our fellow humans goaded us to come out of our blissful and cozy existence and reach out with feelings, with empathy, with solidarity.
Sudan, Ukraine, Palestine, Manipur and such other places or situations where man-made calamities caused untold sufferings to inocent human beings and threatened peace and security. Added to those were natual calamities like earthquakes and cyclones claiming lives and properties and displacing people.
At our home base, we also saw India’s proud moment of moon landing with Chandrayan while, down here on earth, Manipur burned and bull dozer regimes pulverized homes and hopes of some targeted communities; and Christians, Muslims, Dalits and tribals were more marginalised and targeted.
We saw with trepidation many an elected representatives playing the fiddle while the nation burned with communal and inter-community fights, caste oppressions, unrest and unemployment, farmers on the road for justice, minority baiting, destruction of churches and mosques, women demanding justice and what not!
We witnessed helplessly the shocking and shameless throwing out of our parliamentarians from the temple of democracy for asking democratic questions.
We questioned why the midnight knocks of government watchdogs terrorised and victimized selected leaders and citizens. We felt ashamed of the fourth pillar of our democracy acquiring the ignominious label of ‘godi media’ or lapdog media. We sat up and asked ourselves whether authoritarianism is trying to ride roughshod and bury our noble democratic values!
While our labourers were buried alive in the collapsed tunnel in Uttarakhand, all modern technology had failed to reach out to save them, only poor and illiterate ‘rathole miners’ managed to dig in and bring out 41 precious lives trapped for 17 days.
We witnessed with curiosity and anxiety the alien invasion of artificial intelligence trying to make a cakewalk into our lives to belittle and downgrade our human intelligence.
The events in our life during your comradeship enriched us and goaded us to look up and see the silver lining in every dark cloud.
We remain with hope as you depart from us to pass into history. We are grateful to you.
Bye, faithful friend!
