Gerald D'Cunha

  “A smiling face, after a certain age, is a triumph of the human spirit.” Efrat Cybulkiewicz   R ecently, I have started stepping out of my house on some very important and urgent work. Obviously, taking all the Covid-related precautions. I really had to pinch myself to check if a life, such as this, was real! It was! Yesterday, in the autorickshaw in which I was commuting, the driver was a young man. I struck a cordial conversation with him. “It’s pushed us back at least by two years,” he said, “Personally, whatever I had planned and worked for, now two years behind schedule!” I thought about myself: “I am 62… How many years behind schedule I am?” I really do not know… But, one thing I know: a lot of what I had meticulously planned and worked for has been pushed behind… Like the stranger who drove the auto, I, too, am behind schedule… But, then, who prepared the schedule? Who planned, and who was working towards those plans? Did the schedule get disturbed...

Pic.: Pushpa Mistry Kamath “You can only lose what you cling to.” — Buddha L ast week, I had invited a very dear friend of mine to spend an hour with our young PD-students. She did a wonderful job… helping young-ones to correct the most common mistakes they committed while communicating in English. My friend is a very gentle and helpful soul. Now retired, she had been a very popular English teacher… and, like all teachers do, had impacted lives of thousands of students through her teaching career. This morning, I saw a message from my friend… She wanted my e-mail id. Our students had loved her session and found it very useful.  Even though I had conveyed it to her and thanked her profusely, while sending to her my e-mail id, today, I, once again, conveyed to her my students’ and my own sincere feelings… “Gerry, in fact, I needed the e-mail id for that reason,” my friend wrote to me,  “I realized that a lot of threads were hanging lo...