Friends,
Finally, this unpleasant accident has happened to me, too. You always hope for serendipity for yourself, maybe I’ll win the lottery one day. Mishaps and disasters always happen to other people. But will the bomb fall on my house instead of lakhs of other houses in Delhi? Among the thousands of cars that can crash into each other, will my car be the next one? When other people turned sixty, and functions were organised for them, we felt pretty irritated; the whole thing looked ludicrous. An idiot, sitting on a stage, all dressed up like a doll, grinning in a self-absorbed way. People garlanding you, talking about your greatness, enumerating qualities that you either don’t possess or qualities that they will turn into your weaknesses as soon as you get off the stage, qualities that irritate and annoy – is all this going to happen to me too?
Even when we sense the onset of some serious illness, we avoid addressing it. We delude ourselves into thinking that no, his is not that illness, it’s nothing really, it’ll go away on its own. As far as possible, we postpone seeing the doctor, the wretch might confirm the fear spreading like smoke…
Source: ‘I’m not a raja, I’m just Rajendra’: Nayi Kahani pioneer Rajendra Yadav writes in his memoir
