Gerald D'Cunha

“Never buy Gold, simply earn it...” -           Mary Kom A week ago, I received a call from a retired school-teacher. I knew her from the days when she taught in a state-board school. She was an excellent Mathematics teacher and was very popular among the students. After her retirement, she started tuition classes from her residence and students from different boards – SSC , CBSE, ICSE, IB, all – thronged to her place for guidance in Mathematics. I always admired this gifted teacher, who, in her late seventies still reached out to young school-students and kept herself extremely positive and productive… This time, the teacher had called me to check if I could do something about her granddaughter’s nursery admission in a certain ICSE school. I was surprised… She had been a very popular teacher herself… had taught thousands of students… knew so many well-connected parents… and, of all the people, sh...

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide No escape from reality Open your eyes Look up to the skies and see I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy Because I'm easy come, easy go A little high, little low Anyway the wind blows, doesn't really matter to me, to me - From the Freddie Mercury song 'Bohemian Rhapsody' E lvis Presley, John Lennon, Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury… I have adored them all. They were all the ultimate showmen… electrifying on stage… Stupendously larger-than-life cult-figures. If a singer’s success and stardom, as a performer, has to be measured against any bench-marks, certainly, here are those bench-marks! But, then, just as so many of Shakespeare’s best-loved classics are great tragedies, the dizzy lives of Elvis, Lennon, Jackson and Freddie have been just that - colossal tragedies! If the end justifies the means, I, for one, ...

W hen it comes to technology, and particularly the use of social media, people like me can be safely classified as ‘Slow Learners’… aka ‘LDs’… the ones who suffer from a learning disability. I have been writing notes in my diaries ever since I was an adolescent… I did not know, then -   that’s some 42/43 years ago - that writing my notes was a self-healing therapy. Computer hadn’t come to our village… and the internet and the social media hadn’t made their place into the dictionary, yet So, by the time I learnt to operate a computer, my son and my students were already Geeks… fast, furious and impatient. Some of my courteous students patiently sat next to me and helped me open a Blog… Slowly they helped me open my FB account, so that I could share my blog posts on FB. It was a new-found world for me, and, obviously I was excited. But, I heard my son saying, “Dad, you are opening your FB account when many of us are closing ours.” My young son we...

"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly" -           Richard Bach in ‘Illusions’ O n   October 7, when I posted my last Blog– ‘My Spirit is in a Hurry’, I did not have an inkling about the ‘speed-breaker’ I would encounter right around the corner… “There is a cancerous tumor on your right kidney” all test reports concluded, “That kidney has to be removed.” “What? It can’t be true!” my family and I reacted. But, it was true! “You are lucky, that it was detected, accidentally, at an early stage,” every expert reminded, “Go for surgery with no further delay.” We simply surrendered… D uring those twenty-five days in the hospital, I was brought on my knees to learn a few valuable life-lessons, which, but for this experience, I would never have learnt … The value of a simple breath and a single step… The value of simple souls, who I may not get...