Happy Father's Day

This Sunday the third week of June is being celebrated as Father's Day. Did you know that it was first held on June 19th 1910? This day is celebrated in honoring and celebrating fatherhood and paternal bonds.

Memories flood my mind. Not a single day goes by without me remembering my dad. He was a person who had come up the hard way and therefore always had a positive perspective towards life.

He enjoyed taking us out on weekends. It would just be simple outings like sitting on the steps of Vidhana Soudha and looking at life passing by, or a walk down Commercial street, MG Road or Lalbagh. Eating out was also something that he loved. Places like MTR, Coffee House, Vidyarthi Bhavan, were his favourites depending on the areas that we visited.

His passion was travelling and seeing new places. Luckily, his job took him to different parts of the world and he would describe to us in detail about the places that he had visited. He also used to enjoy nature a lot. He immensely enjoyed watching sunrise and sunsets while going on vacation to picturesque hill stations or in our native place. Infact we were also woken up early just so that he wanted us also to appreciate the beauty of nature.

He was spiritually inclined right from an early age and he used to collect lots of spiritual record albums. Every night after dinner we all used to sit with lights switched off to listen to melodious bhajans sung by Lata Mangeshkar, Suman Kalyanpur, Bhimsen Joshi, Sudhir Phadke. He also loved listening to instrumental music and therefore as children we also learnt about Allah Rakha, Bismillah Khan, Pt. Shivkumar Sharma and many other eminent masters and developed that deep love for music.

He started collecting spiritual books right from his younger days. This collection he would say was to keep him occupied the day he would retire from work. And he did exactly that. After his retirement, he did a two year course in Sanskrit just so that he could understand the meanings of the shlokas from Bhagavadgita and Puranas. But his field being science and specially being into research and development, he started reading lots of science books and spiritual books. His aim was to connect science and spirituality. It was also that time when Aastha, Sanskar and other channels dealing with spiritual aspect of life started. This was a great way for him to expand his spiritual horizon.

He spent a lot of time documenting his observations in a compilation, from the research he had done in quest of finding answers to the simple question "Who Am I?" and was in the process of sending it to different publishers, but I guess God had other plans. Before he could finish his task, he went personally on that long journey seeking answers from the almighty himself.

It's now been one and half years but not a single day goes by without remembering him. A special thanks to God to have given me such a wonderful father who has held me and led me this far in life along with my dear mother.