Till dawn showed me the other side!!!

 The river rushed through stone and stubborn hill,

and hit a wall of rock that held its ground —

she'd moved through mountains, never once stood still,

so why was this the place she couldn't get around?

She'd given everything — her depth, her might,

had worn down harder walls on harder days.

Did worthy water not deserve its right?

Did honest rivers lose themselves in maze?

She turned — unwilling, sharp, against her way,

a detour she had never stopped to choose.

The bend felt wrong, the current went astray,

like someone else had laced up all her shoes.

But every twist was teaching her the land,

each forced turn carving valleys, soft and wide

what felt like loss was quietly being planned,

a sea she simply couldn't see inside.

She met the ocean on a still, pale dawn,

not where she'd mapped, not how she'd dreamed the end,

and realised every wall she'd beaten on

was just God's way of teaching her to bend.

Hence Proved!!!

 

There is something quietly suffocating about the moment a teacher draws a ray of light on a blackbo
ard and says — this is refraction. As if light, agreed to bend itself at precise, measurable angles just so it could be plotted on graph paper. As if the sunset bleeding orange into the horizon was waiting all this time for Snell's Law to give it permission to be beautiful.

I have always suspected that the formula arrives after the wonder. That somewhere, in the first breath of it, there was a human being who simply felt something — who looked at a stick half-submerged in water and went quiet inside. Not because they wanted to measure the bend. But because the bend meant something. Something unnameable. Something that lived just past the edges of language.

And then as we always do with things we cannot hold, we tried to cage it.

Here is what no one says aloud in the classroom:
Every great scientist was, at their core, a deeply dissatisfied mystic, in awe of a hidden truth behind reality.

Einstein did not sit down one morning and deduce relativity from existing data. He imagined himself riding alongside a beam of light. He dreamed his way into it and then, almost reluctantly, dressed it in mathematics so the world would take him seriously. The poetry came first. The proof was the apology.

Newton, they say, watched an apple fall. But who amongst us truly believes the revelation was about the apple? It was about the fall itself. The helpless, inevitable surrender of everything toward everything else. And because the world asks for evidence, he gave it equations. But the equations were never the point. They were the translation and like all translations, something gorgeous was lost.

Science, does the same. It names the rainbow so thoroughly that no one has to feel it anymore. It explains the detail of a minor chord until the detail dissolves into frequency and amplitude — tidy, measurable, and completely beside the point.

The formula is the fence. Built, perhaps, not to protect the truth but to protect the people who found it first.

Ramanujan ,that strange, luminous man from Madras, said his equations came to him in dreams. A goddess wrote them on his tongue. He felt mathematics the way a poet feels a line arriving, not constructed, but received. He had no formal proof for most of what he knew. He simply knew. And the Western academy, so in love with its Hence Proved-s, spent decades catching up to what he had already seen, barefoot, in the dark.

Perhaps the they are all artists in disguise. They just wear lab coats because society doesn’t give them any other outfit for that kind of curiosity.

The deepest freedom, maybe, is this: To look at refraction and not reach for the formula. To let the bent light simply be bent. To sit with velocity not as a quotient but as a feeling, the way your stomach lifts when a car picks up speed and for one moment you are not a body with mass but just motion itself, pure and directionless and free.

Science, at its finest, points fingers at the mystery. It is only the textbook that mistakes the pointing finger for the mysterious moon. And somewhere between the discovery of the moon and the classroom only pointing at its glow, this translation gets mistaken for the original. And the original beauty of the moon is left behind.

You are more than fair!!!

There is a moment I keep returning to — walking back to the car when it was all over. Something slipping, not just from my hands, but from the very idea that hands could hold such things at all. That hard work and a sharp mind are enough. That you can will your way through anything if you just try hard enough. I believed that. And then I didn't anymore.

I remember being numb in the way you are numb after a film ends and the lights come on and you walk out into the parking lot and the world is just — still there. Unchanged. Indifferent. And you think, maybe if I just keep moving, it will fade into the background like scenes always do.

It doesn't.

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They tell you to find justifications and I have tried them all. He didn't suffer. He went the way he would have wanted — active, upright, himself until the end. He wouldn't have liked to be seen diminished. My mind nods along. My heart says — "are you really going to believe all of that?"

The only justification that has ever truly held me is this: he knew. Not in the way we pretend to know things. In the quiet, unhurried way of a man who had made his peace.

Since June, he was asking to get involved in things — his business passingbon little pieces of his wisdom, his worries at work. In August he told me to idealise Gagan, because there is no better friend than your partner. I distinctly remember his call from Mansarovar. 

In September came the health lecture, serious and uncharacteristic. In October he agreed to two trips he would normally have declined, and told me he was making up for all the hours of committed time he had never quite kept. He always believed in working, not in wasting — and so he worked, right until the end, at the quiet business of leaving well.

From November he reminded me of his deadline. January 15th, he said. Again in December. So that when the 16th came, I could not say I hadn't been warned. Could not say he had been unfair. He even came back strong from that last flight, as if to say — "don't pull my leg for this. I gave you no reason to."

Life may be unfair. He never was. Not once.

There is a particular kind of love that does not announce itself. It just makes sure, quietly and without fuss, that the ones it loves will be alright. That they have been told what they need to know, held when they needed holding, prepared without knowing they were being prepared.

He gave more in his years than most could give in a longer life. That is not consolation. That is just true.

The moon has no light of its own. It reflects the sun — borrows that brightness and offers it back to the world as something softer, something that can be looked at directly. I was that moon. His belief in me was the light I worked by, the reason I wanted to do things, to be things — so he would see and feel proud.

And now the sun is gone, and I am learning — slowly, bewilderingly — what it means to shine without a source. Whether the moon can find its own light, or whether it must learn that the light was never entirely borrowed to begin with.

I don't have that answer yet.

What I do have is the memory of a hug at an airport — tight, unhurried, real. And something after that which I will not try to explain, because some things lose their truth in the telling. They are meant only for you, sealed in a place where no logic can touch them.

Papa, 'I miss you' feels too small. Language was not built for this size of feeling. So I will just say, you were more than fair. You were more than most. And somewhere in the quiet, I know you know.

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