Tamaso Ma - 17

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Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection

....Shakespeare

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I am one of those crazy guys who postpone all decisions in life indefinitely...but once they take a decision, they can't wait to act on them.

For all of 14 years at that godforsaken campus of IIT KGP, I was a chain-smoking bachelor with never any thought of marriage...indeed many of my students in the 1970s refused to believe that I got married, had a son, and left smoking...they thought there was some mistake and it must be an imposter gps.

One of those happy bachelor days I happened to visit my married sister at Tirupati. And she and her husband insisted I go uphills with them and have the 'darshan' of Lord Balajee whose specialty was granting boons. 

I left my shoes outside and went into the sanctum sanctorum just to humor my sister. With absolutely no thought of marrying.

And as we returned and I was tying my shoelaces, it struck me like a thunderbolt that KGP campus was a wretched and lonely place and I HAD to get married at the earliest. This volte-face remained a mystery to me till I came to know later on that there was, right there in Tirupati, a bride doing her MD thesis and praying for an IIT KGP husband...

Her marriage took place within a year...

In 2000 I was on a trip to Nellore to look up the same sister as a happy-go-lucky guy since my son had just then got into IIT KGP. My sister then asked me why not I buy a house in Nellore. And the suggestion was like a thunderbolt again and I thought why not. Within a week an apartment was booked at Nellore, a housing loan taken at a hefty 14%...and that was that.

I then returned to KGP and one night I was caught in one of those short sharp showers for which KGP is famous. There was nothing unusual about it and I must have been drenched a hundred times in all those 35 years and loved it. But that moment I got vexed and decided that it was impossible for me to get drenched anymore. And I phoned my friend NP that I needed a car desperately.

And I had a new Maruti 800 within a week with a car loan at 14% again...

And then I was left with a bank balance of Rs 40,000 only meant for emergencies.

And one evening my son went to the Computer Section at midnight for doing some home assignment of their CSE class but returned empty-handed and forlorn saying that all the computers were busy (many playing games) and he couldn't find a slot.

Then and there I decided I should gift my son a home computer...

My friend NP again saw to it that a brand new PC with Windows 95 was installed at my home. And I asked him how much it cost. And he said Rs 40,000...

That was how I became penniless after 'serving' IIT KGP for 35 years.

Some spot decisions those...as luck would have it, all of them turned out to be fruitful...my wife turned out to be an angel, my Nellore apartment that I bought for Rs 7 lakhs got sold for Rs 17 lakhs...my Maruti 800 is still going strong, my D-i-L driving it daily to her bus stop with me as a 'valet-parker', and my son got a job as a Java specialist after he passed his MSc in Industrial Chemistry...

My decision to get my cataracts removed had to wait all of 8 years...but once the decision was made, I couldn't wait for even a week...


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