~ Hasijaji - Life of Prudence ~

Today I want to present before you a life story of a wonderful man – a septuagenarian who has seen it all in his life’s journey. With an established career and a family to boast of, he now passes much of his time in the neighborhood park , brisk walking and sometimes silently sitting and engrossed in his own world of thoughts and imagination whilst he reads his daily set of newspapers.

I met him during recent times and quickly formed a bond with him as we shared the same bench – the unexpected rendezvous turned out to be a general chitchat of the situation of our country, then progressed into asking about each other's personal details and family's wellbeing. The bond we shared quickly turned out to be of friendliness and the meetings started to happen quite often, almost everyday as the time overlapped.

One day whilst we were talking about life and its uncertainties , we started to share our personal situations and circumstances and what life begets for each of us – “Hasija-ji” as I call him now, shared me a parable about his life – he routed to his topic of marriage and having a family as I had enquired about his! He started that he has two kids and both are very well settled in their own personal life – they were self-attained personalities and had done Bachelors in Engineering from prestigious college of Delhi and made of choice of professional life all by themselves.

Internally, he was very proud of sharing the achievements of his two children and his eyes just lit up whilst he shared their stories but he had a sublime regret, which during the course of his storytelling he quite remorsefully shared with me – he was separated from his better half since more than two decades, as he termed this event as ‘Fault in our stars!” – he had a well educated wife working for a premier bank of India and after initial hiccups , she moved out of life of domesticity – she was confident enough to manage and up bring her two children and she did so with great alacrity – this was again a fact which Hasijaji shared with me as a matter of pride – quite obviously, he still loves his wife very much as I could gauge his tone and demeanor and misses her company. Man is a social animal and cant live without relationships, be whatsoever wealth of achievements one can boast of in his kitty, he has to partner with someone to spearhead this journey of life – especially when, once the kids gets into their own working life and get absorbed in their own family!

“Sanjeevji – Sometimes what you want from life does not happen and initially you regret the situation and start to comprehend and analyze the whole events to find the cause of such happenings, but after a thinking rigor , you have to believe in the power of providence, and you certainly cant ignore it whilst you live.”

I could related to his story with an empathetic feelings as I have almost passed my prime age of being called a youngster – I could gauge what he was talking about and the empirical of life which comes to forefront in everyone’s life.

The best part of him is that, though he is alone, he enjoys his life situations and makes it a point to be happy and does assorted activities – from medication to exercise and also the best part of his living is that “He is a stock market champ!” – here I wont give myself the liberty to exhaust it all but since last 3 decades Hasijaji has been an active stock mart investor and thus has got to know the pulse of market dynamism – though he is ever humble and versatile in his outlook.

We generally talk about varied subjects of life – from destiny to health, wealth and sometimes share our common feelings of spirituality and God – He is a well-travelled  man and one observation about him which captivated my eyes was that he is a voracious reader and carries 3-4 newspapers daily in his bag which he carries daily to the park.

Today, as I met him, we shared commonality about life and the best question we came across was “ What is the purpose of life?, I am 70+, all hale and hearty with good financial strength and no obligation whatsoever but still I ponder of my livability!”– pondering about this question, I had no satiating answer as this is the key question amongst many of us who one day would be free from our moral and societal duties and would sit ideally and wait for our time to end this beautiful journey of life – till then ,many amongst us would be in a state of spiritual quest and meddle over this “Question of a lifetime for which many researches and experiments are being done to know the being of our existence!