"Have Patience" said Dad

I rang up my Dad first thing in the morning today. As a matter of fact, I often speak to my 82 yr old father whenever I get time. But today it was different. "How are you all? "He asked in his usual positive tone.

"Life is tough, Dad"I said. After a second's silence, he quipped,"Have patience".

I only had to listen to the words to feel a sudden calmness descending on me. Perhaps, because the words came from a man who had walked on the rough and thorny paths far more than I had. Not just that. Here was a man,who because of age, was fighting amnesia and yet had comforting words for me.

Suddenly things didn't look stranded anymore. It dawned on me, that my life was not all together a passenger train. There were places where I was moving fast. But I was not looking there at all. And so with a positive note, I went to my office. Rightly so, I had some encouraging news there. Come evening and my Director's teenaged daughter told me how she had scored high marks in English because my regular coaching.

Naturally, I am in my jolly mood again. I do intend to thank Dad at the earliest. I remember he had on several occasions told me in childhood,"Count your blessings". It's sad that, I time and again, forget the advice he gave me.

Not exactly arrogant. This younger Generation.

The week has ended with this sweet feeling that all is not wrong with the younger generation! They are an aggressive lot alright. But they do make efforts to understand people like me.

Remember, I had talked about this young executive in my last blog who had messed up in the college magazine? Well it was nice to see her put in extra effort this week. She continues to be a little distant. But then I have decided not to hold any grudges against her.

Talking about the college magazine, it was great fun working on it this week. There were articles on 'Mother', 'Childhood', and so on. Some guys in the agency got down to helping me get good images for the articles. The camaraderie shown was overwhelming to the core. The only problem being that they constantly came up with pictures of 'an ever-sacrificing mother' for the article on mother. And when it came to finding a suitable image for childhood, they only thought of infants in mothers' arms. And so I told them to look for pictures of children playing .

The college magazine contained the Hindi translation of Robert Frost poem,'The woods are lovely dark and deep..' Vikas, our photographer and Graphic Designer liked it so much that he took down the original poem from the internet. He also listened to me when I spoke of the poem 'Good fences make good neighbours' written by the same poet Robert Frost.

And so there was this 'Feel Good' factor through out the week making me forget issues like 'generation gap'. I think it is finally showing patience to one another.