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, she he had called me for help. “Gerry, I have

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 went o

"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 to see again, anytime in future – the