I write so many things, mostly fictions and sometime others. Today I feel writing about my dad who passed away yesterday at our residence, and perhaps his soul has gone to a place that is not infected by Covid-19.
In my view, my dad lived his life what he believed in. He practiced his political beliefs and stayed on the ground. Being a Civil Engineer, in his earlier life he lived in commune and he was a whole timer. Then he took job in a private company and gained expertise in bridge constructions over the years. The only reason he took the job was to fund the party. Later he tried to get a job in the public sector but got rejected in police verification process every time. Much later in some conversations between my mom and dad, we learned our family used to run from my mom’s salary only. As we grew up, when I was 7th grade or so, my mom’s salary became insufficient to sustain the cost of living, education etc, my dad then started sharing a portion of his salary to the family.
Among few things he was passionate about, he was a good debater. In our upbringing it was not a practice in our home to learn how great was my dad. I learned it discovering a state level champion certificate kept folded in a book. Then my mom told me that section of our home library was all prizes that my dad got in various debate competitions.
Among several father-son discussions where a son learns things from his father that are not in traditional books, once he told me quoting a Hindu Philosophy (forgotten the exact reference), there are three kinds of greed, 1) greed of money, which is the easiest to overcome, 2) greed of lust which is much more difficult to overcome, even saints failed at times, and 3) greed of fame – it cannot be overcome, not even Gods overcame this greed.
In one other discussion, he told me how government should implement secularism. Should the government promote all religions equally or should the government stay away from all religions. The difficulty is that Government has a responsibility to recognize a group of any form and their practices. What is the right way of handling it and why? It opened my vision of seeing things with appropriateness and practice it.
Besides learning math from him in my junior class, one of the most important things I learnt as how to differentiate between what is culture and what is superstition?
Like all of us, I have my treasure that I got from my dad. In the late age, he wanted to convert himself to become “Vaishnab”, but that didn’t happen, perhaps because of his age and limitation of his independent mobility.
Few years back, he willed for his organs and his body for medical study and research. After he passed away and we got all clearance and paper works, his body was transported to Malda Medical College. A tale of a simple person.
