Bees Saal Baad

Bees Saal Baad

On July 4, 2015, we, a group of University friends, reconnected after a gap of twenty two years. Reconnecting after such a long time gave us a perspective of where we stood in our life contexts. Catching up with old friends is like travelling back in a time machine which has the ability to transport you to a zone of life which stayed still even as you moved on.

I have always been fascinated by the Bees Saal Baad funda in Bollywood, where lovers, families, brothers, friends drift away and have a rendezvous in curious circumstances bees saal baad. I have always wondered at the logic of such a reunion especially considering the consistency of the bees saal baad rant. Yet, on July 4, 2015, I got a taste of this curious plot when me and my university friends met as a group after twenty two years. The laughter, leg pulling and openness of expression had the makings of a Bollywood potboiler. We simply let our hair down and behaved in a manner that befitted us twenty two years ago and not now, as that baton had presumably passed on to our kids.

We passed out of university – the best two years of academia for all of us perhaps, bolstered by the camaraderie we shared – in 1993 and all of us simply drifted into our own life spaces. Reconnecting after such a long time gave us a perspective of where we stood in our life contexts. A satisfying noting was to see everyone happy in their spaces and choices. We all made a brief presentation of what we had done in all these years and my story of course had all the makings of a masala film.

Cut to 1995 – bees saal pahale - and I was building my career as a journalist. It was the decade when the concrete effects of economic liberalisation were being felt in the country. Satellite television and mobile phones were getting entrenched and changing the fundamental habits of our living. The look and feel of the country was undergoing a major makeover. It was a time when the country was celebrating its second freedom – that came from market-driven choices, having for so long been stifled by the licence permit raj. I had an MA (Politics) degree with a brief work experience as a research assistant and here I was in 1995 trying to be a responsible citizen as well as family member by embarking on a career in financial journalism.

Bees saal baad in 2015, life is unrecognizable from the day on May 1, 1995 when I walked into the Business Standard office in Mumbai to join as a rookie correspondent. Since then, after six years in journalism with a role change to editing to boot, love, marriage and kid, and eight years as a training professional, now I am a fledgling entrepreneur for the past six years, trying to establish a robust learning & development business. In these twenty years, I have grown within by leaps and bounds with the help of my meditation and Reiki practice. A deep passion to create a training legacy and to take Reiki to every home drives me. I am also dabbling big time into writing with three published books under my belt. By God's grace, there is a restlessness generally noticeable in ambitious youth.

My life truly began at 40, when I took hopefully an irreversible plunge into living my dream – doing the things I like doing – speaking, teaching Reiki, training, writing. It is incredible that I started my life all over again at 40 after having attained a respectable position in corporate life with a more-than-respectable salary. I am driven by the need to create to legacy of learning and healing, so that even after I am gone from this world, generations to come can benefit from my creation.

I have a theory called the Death Theory, which essentially means we all are allocated a certain quota of life which diminishes with every passing moment. Within this lies our opportunity as well as the urgency that is required to start working on the dreams implanted within each one of us. We all are part of the larger cosmic ecosystem, yet are born unique. It is both a responsibility as well as a privilege given only to human beings to explore this uniqueness. Time is a great reminder of our mortality. It rapidly moves despite us and not because of us. Our life is inter-twined with time, but time itself functions independent of our thoughts, feelings, emotions – even existence.

Time in the little over four-and-a-half decades of my life has flown past like an aeroplane in the sky. Time is like that plane, which even as you try to fathom its magnificence simply leaves you staring distantly at a wondrous contraption that just whizzed past above you. Bees saal baad what I have are memories of a distant past which seems to have magically arrived like a living present when I experienced the rendezvous with my University friends. Catching up with old friends is like travelling back in a time machine which has the ability to transport you to a zone of life which stayed still even as you moved on.

An interesting aspect of the reunion was the common thought we all shared – where would we be placed bees saal baad from now! It seems too distant to discuss right now, but it seemed the same way bees saal pahale, and lo! it arrived like a miracle on the day of the rendezvous, leaving us all stunned as well as excited with its impact. Time however taught us agian that we just need to be rooted in the present, occasionally dig into the past for perspective as well as learning, and have a clear vision for the future. Bees saal baad has arrived, the next one is bees saal baad. We'll meet the bridge when it comes.