A center of excellence is the best thing that can be created in this world. The reason is that it involves several decades of dedicated work, generations of people, and a great purpose that is relentlessly pursued without wavering. And above all, it changes destinies of countless people across generations. Unfortunately, India lacks such centers. There is no Indian university in the top 100 universities of the world and most of our national laboratories are not counted in the global comity of science.

I have been connected with the LV Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad, more as an admirer and know Dr G. Nageswara Rao, its founder, and Dr Tara Prasad Das, the second-in-command, as friends. In 1996, when Dr APJ Abdul Kalam started having difficulty in reading, I took him to the Institute. Dr Das checked his eyes, assisted by optometrist Ghanshyam, and he was prescribed glasses. He never had any problem with his eyes thereafter, but that visit created a lifetime bond between him and the Institute. 

When Dr Kalam became the President of India, Dr Das sought Dr Kalam’s help to start an eye hospital in Bhubaneshwar, to where he belonged. A word from Dr Kalam to Chief Minister Naveen Patnaikji made things move fast. I accompanied him on the inauguration day on July 3, 2006. At the time, Dr Kalam said, “This hospital has the great challenge of providing eye care support to Orissa (now Odisha) state where nearly 2 percent of their population is visually challenged as against the national average of 1.4 percent.” Sacrificing his retina research work wherein he is world-renowned, Dr Das stayed there for six years to ensure that systems and people were in place. And today, LVPEI, Bhubaneshwar is a center of excellence in its own right.

Months before he departed, in February 2015, Dr Kalam visited Rajgangpur in Odisha’s Sundargarh district to inaugurate a unit of the LVPEI there. True to its name, this beautiful district has half its area under forest cover and numerous colorful tribes dotting its landscape. But for someone who lacks the gift of vision, of what use is all this? The hospital soon became a hub for needy patients in Raigarh and Jashpur districts of Chhattisgarh, Simdega and West Singhbhum districts of Jharkhand, and the Keonjhar district of Odisha. There was no good eye hospital even in cities like Jharsuguda, Sambalpur, Deogarh and Angul in this region. 

While returning to Delhi, at Bhubaneshwar airport, Dr Kalam hugged Dr Das and said, “I am proud of you.” Who knew it was the last time they would meet! Today, similar to Rajgangpur – LVPEI has established hospitals at Rayagada, Berhampur and Keonjhar; the fifth one in Odisha is being built at Balasore, not very far from the Wheeler Island, now called APJ Abdul Kalam Island. 

I had my cataract surgery done at the LV Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad, on May 13, 2015, in the left eye and recently, on March 3, 2021, in the right eye. Dr Das received me at the hospital as a brother would. Both procedures were conducted by Dr Pravin V. Krishna, Chief of Cornea Division at the Institute. Dr Pravin’s father is a Radar scientist who worked for the Electronics Research & Development Establishment (LRDE), Bengaluru. In Defence parlance, ‘E’ is used for explosive and the second letter ‘L’ is used as abbreviation for electronics. Dr Pravin did his medical graduation at Bangalore Medical College and ophthalmology at Guntur Medical College. Living in Hyderabad for the last 19 years, he sees LVPEI as his sanctuary. 

Keep doing your work like a precision machine, in a sterile environment, serving people whom you don’t even know, is how I understand “Tapas,” as mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita, and what we can call “ardor,” in the modern world. People like Dr Nageswara Rao, Dr Tara Prasad Das, and Dr Pravin Krishna are indeed blessed souls who have been sent in this world to relieve pain. Ordinary people and those in the medical profession who opted for making money and collecting toys like big cars, diamond studded watches and gold tipped pens, would never taste the bliss these people feel.

How is a center of excellence created? And more importantly, how does it sustain itself?

For the sincere seekers of answers to these two questions, LVPEI is indeed gold-standard. First comes the land. It must be owned by the hospital. The Hyderabad campus of LVPEI is built over the land donated by LV Prasad Film Studio after their Telugu film Maro Charitra (1978) and its Hindi version Ek Duje Ke Liye (1981) proved blockbusters. Except giving his name to the institute, LV Prasad forbade his successors from interfering in it in any manner. Dr Nageswara Rao approached his non-resident Indian friends for donations in order to create the institution, like Buddha did to create the Sangha. Almost every room bears the name of the donor who helped create it. Later, Dr K. Anji Reddy, founder of Dr Reddy’s Laboratories donated a part of his fortune made in pharmaceutical industry to modernize the building. 

Next come the human resources. You need people for whom serving a patient is a “calling” and not a job. And they must be continuously trained by the best in the world and on the best of the machines. When Dr Rao was elected Chair of the Board and CEO of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB), he refused to relocate to London and in an unprecedented gesture, IAPB shifted its headquarters to Hyderabad for his entire term in office. Everyone arrives at the Institute at 7 a.m. and attends one hour of learning before reaching their workstations at 8 a.m. Every month, employees are acknowledged for their good work through a peer review system. 

Good medicine rests on Research. What a patient needs must be sensed right by the doctor and delivered right by adapting global technology to the local conditions. Renowned scientist, Dr D. Balasubramanian, chose to work at LVPEI after his retirement from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology as Director. He told me that it was here that he carried out the best of his work on stem cell biology and its use in restoring lost vision. Seeing him working in his eighties is like meeting a Rishi.  

Finally and of utmost importance is the working capital that is needed to provide world-class treatment and services on a day-to-day basis. The general solution is high tariffs that have given our best hospitals the tag of “five stars.” LVPEI has solved this problem by starting a “Sight Saver” system. Here, people voluntarily pay high tariffs, just as we buy a business class ticket while travelling by air. A part of this tariff is used to subsidize the treatment of poor people, who pay low tariffs and even nothing, in many cases. Like in the aircraft that ensures safe travel for everyone, there is no difference in the quality of the treatment. However, “sight savers” are given other facilities, like the use of a good lounge or parking area near the entrance and other making-you-feel-special mannerisms. 

Why are there not many other hospitals like LVPEI? May be goodness has to always be in limited supply! Not many doctors make it their life’s mission to create institutions that outlive their lives, keeping their families away from ownership, and living and dying while doing their work and serving others. I know many people who are in the Institute since its inception. It is not that they get the highest salaries here, but they feel rich on being a part of this Institute and put this bliss at a premium. 

Books have been my companions since childhood. My father worked in the Meerut Municipality and during the summer holidays, I would get books issued from the Loyal Library at the Town Hall, near his office, in his name. I mostly read Hindi books. I acquired the skill of reading English books in 1974, thanks to Late Ved Prakash Agarwalji. He also guided me into reading philosophy. After coming to Hyderabad in 1982, I started buying books. My first purchase was Wayne Dyer’s book, The Sky’s the Limit. I paid Rs. 80 for it at the roadside book stall at GPO in the Abids area. 

General R. Swaminathan and Dr APJ Abdul Kalam took notice of my literary talent. I published my first book with General Swaminathan in 1988. It was he who seeded the idea of a biography in Dr Kalam’s mind, and this is how Wings of Fire was written and published in 1999. The book was very well received and indeed made Dr Kalam, who was already a celebrated scientist, a public persona, loved and admired by commoners across India. Twenty years later, Wings of Fire is still ‘hot’ and sells in good numbers. 

In a sense, books are like pictures of the author’s thoughts, giving the readers an everlasting vision to posterity. These days, I prefer to write blogs and columns, which are more like snapshots. However, the wish to write another timeless classic like Wings of Fire remains, perhaps to record the remainder of my readings and experiential learnings. I dabbled with the idea of doing a Carl Jung, who wrote Memories, Dreams, Reflections starting with – “My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious…” – but gave up as I found myself confused. 

The idea, however, pushed me to study Vedanta, first Swami Vivekananda and later, the original champion, Adi Shankaracharya. I can now see myself as a part of “One,” but I am still not thorough enough to be able to see others around me also as parts of the same “One.” I have read Greek philosophy and find myself closest to the tradition of Stoics, which I see as a secular version of the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita. 

The purpose of human life, as I understand it, is to realize God-consciousness. All the drama of the world is meant to facilitate this realization for every person. Wise people not only watch this drama but also leave behind their comments and wisdom as thoughts in the form of books to share with the people who live after them, like engineering handbooks providing standards of threads and surfaces.

A few months ago, I stumbled upon Roberto Calasso’s book, Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India. The meaning of “Ka” – Who? – was indeed intriguing.  It was taken from Rg Veda Mandala 10, Hymn 121 – कस्मै देवाय हविषा विधेम, What god shall we adore with our oblation? I was amazed to read this book capturing brilliantly the entire stream of Indian thought from the Vedas to Buddha. How could an Italian know all this? Later, I learnt that before this book, Calasso had been writing about the myths of various civilizations since 1989. Ka was published in 1996 in Italian and in 1998 in English. He later wrote one more book on Indian thought, Ardor, in 2014. 

I always found it paradoxical that Vedic people performed sacrifices. Especially, the killing of a horse for the Ashvamedha Yajna seemed barbaric and indeed repulsive. However, after reading Ardor, I could understand that Vedic sacrifice was the means to acknowledge and contain violence through religious rituals and practices. As Calasso puts it, the modern gods of money and power claim scores of victims in their enterprise, which are basically sacrifices for their success.

Calasso was born into an aristocratic family in Florence, Italy, in 1941. His father was a law professor and mother, a scholar of German literature. In 1954, the family moved to Rome. Calasso worked for a publishing firm in Milan and became its chairman in 1999. He was quoted by the New York Times as saying, “…the tradition of literature is a kind of living creature, a ‘serpent of books’ winding its way through the centuries…”. Calasso indeed is using his life and work to capture the evolution of human consciousness through the ages – from the ancient to the modern. 

In February 2018, Calasso told The Hindu, “India, as you know, has been submerged with money these last years, and that has changed many things, both in a good and in a bad way. The scene has been transformed in a dramatic manner. And it’s only the beginning . . . the word ‘post-colonialism’ has produced many distorted consequences.”

To me, inequality in the world is demonic distortion. The wealthiest one percent of the world’s population owns more than half of the world’s wealth. This was possible due to technology, which was unleashed over humanity without the option of rejecting it. Celebrated author and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Yuval Noah Harari, calls these very powerful people as Homo Deus, gods in human form. 

The way nano, bio, and info technologies and cognitive sciences are converging, in the not very distant future, privileged people, by virtue of wealth, or power, or whatever, will live long lives with enhanced cognitive skills and physical health. The poor and impoverished will face strange pandemics and perish. Would this be called a restoration of order? In Hindu mythology, the next incarnation of God is scheduled by the name “Kalki,” a humanoid, a robot with human form or characteristics. 

The other day, I was having a discussion with Prof. Seyed Ehtesham Hasnain, a renowned microbiologist, former Vice Chancellor of Hyderabad University and a JC Bose National Fellow. I remarked that the way the corona vaccine was developed in less than a year’s time, it looked like beginning of the end of the pandemic era. Prof Hasnain said, “I hope so, but better put a question mark.” Although science knows a lot about viruses now, the enigma of life is too deep and dark. The short of the long view is that despite advances in Science and Technology, we could not predict the arrival of SARS-CoV-2 and may not be able to predict the next big pandemic either. Maybe a book needs to be written connecting the scattered dots to find the pattern and capture the vision out of fast-changing frames.  

I have been blessed with the love and affection of some outstanding people, who gave me new insights and changed the way I think and feel. It all started when I arrived at GB Pant University for my graduation in Mechanical Engineering. It was indeed a transformative experience. The sprawling campus, organized as a semi-circle with the administrative building at the center, overlooking the vast farm spread up to the horizon, was surreal. Rows of trees on both sides of every road; I had never seen this quality of landscape earlier. A thicket of eucalyptus trees surrounding the campus was another wonder. I learnt that these low-altitude hybrid trees, planted in 1962 over a 100,000-ha area of Terai, indeed paved the way for the people settling down here in what was otherwise wild. 

In 1982, I relocated to Hyderabad and witnessed the creation of the Research Centre Imarat (RCI) in the mid-eighties as the missile integration laboratory. In ‘Wings of Fire’, Dr Kalam shared that on the penultimate night of the Agni Missile launch on May 21-22, 1989, when Defence Minister KC Pantji asked Dr Kalam what reward he would seek for the success, Dr Kalam asked for an urban forest of 100,000 trees in the new campus. It indeed happened. Now, three decades later, when a flight takes off from the new Hyderabad airport Eastward, flying over the RCI, nobody can miss the thick green cover in the otherwise rocky plateau of Hyderabad. 

After becoming the president of India in 2002, Dr Kalam launched an ambitious Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA) mission articulated by Prof PV Indiresan, Former Director, IIT, Madras. Dr. Kalam saw the migration of villagers to the city as a serious problem and developed alliances with knowledgeable people in urban planning. On July 14, 2004, President Kalam inaugurated the CII-Sohrabji Godrej Green Business Centre in Hyderabad, declared as the only building in the world with ‘platinum rating’ under the Leadership in Energy & Environment Design (LEED) rating system Version 2.0 of the US Green Building Council. Only two other buildings in the US had this rating under Version 1.0. The celebrated Hitec City of Hyderabad was taking birth and it was such a timely event.  

I was present during the tête-à-tête that President Kalam had with the charismatic Jamshyd Naoroji Godrej after the function. When Dr Kalam asked him who indeed leads urban planning in the world, the Chairman of Godrej & Boyce crisply said – Japan. The mechanical engineer who had studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology explained, “The difference between Japan and the rest of the world is that in Japan, they plan extensively.” They both developed an instant bonding. Later, he invited Dr Kalam to inaugurate the Green Building Congress on September 15, 2005, in New Delhi. It was indeed a special day, celebrated as Engineers Day in India, Sri Lanka and Tanzania, honoring civil engineer, Sir M. Visvesvaraya, on his birthday. Dr Kalam made me a part of the event.

At the Green Building Congress, Dr Kalam said, “In our country, there are 300 million people who are in the mid-income group category and about 260 million people are living below the poverty line. Each one of them dreams of having a roof above his head. In order to make their dreams a reality, we need about 100 to 150 million houses to be built in the next 15 years. Today, when we talk about Green buildings, it always means a high society building or a high-tech laboratory. This Green Building Congress should address how you would give the benefit of the Green technology to the middle class and below.”

As if hearing this clarion call, Ashutosh Pathak, who studied Civil Engineering at GB Pant University, decided to make it the mission of his life. After his master’s at IIT, Delhi, in Building Sciences and Construction Management, Ashutosh joined CPWD and was working as Director, Public Works, in the Government of Delhi. Later, he freed himself from bureaucratic tangles and joined JP Greens, the biggest urbanization project that was being rolled out in the National Capital Region. He metamorphosed himself as the angel creating a holistic living experience through the perfect amalgamation of residential, commercial, institutional and recreational facilities in a self-sustainable format.

In 2010, I met another crusader of sustainability, Dr A Mohan Rao. A Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1972, he worked for GE Power for two decades, and pioneered private sector power generation in India. Dr Rao was starting a Bioenergy project to distil out the energy from the waste of the sugar industry (Press Mud and Spent Wash) and turn the remainder into organic fertilizer. He invested his own money and created the plant at the Warana Sugar Mill. But more than completing it, he obtained all the regulatory approvals for the use of biogas as LPG grade fuel and CNG grade automobile fuel. As a perfect example of serendipity, Dr Rao found Carbanion 6-6-8 in the final residue of this process, which acts as a highly potent Biostimulator for the plant, acting as a catalyst for photosynthesis.

His success was seen by the world and Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers, Santa Rosa, Texas, invited him to replicate his plant there. In fact, until I saw at his working table, Thomas Edison’s words, “Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge,” I had really not understood the source from where the spring of his enthusiasm was spurting. The coronavirus pandemic has shown us the perils of living too fast, pillaging nature, and disturbing the evolutionary balance that is as delicate as it is ruthless. This balance can take lives as efficiently as it creates them. 

Then I met Govind Dholakia, the self-made diamond baron in Surat. In 1964, he arrived as a diamond polisher from his arid land in Saurashtra, the peninsular region of Gujarat, at 16 years of age. He established his own diamond company – Shree Ramkrishna Exports in 1970 – which now (in 2020) has an annual turnover of US$ 1.5 billion. When he was creating the new building for his company, he decided to go for LEED’s Gold rating and met in that process, Mahesh Ramanujam, President and CEO, U.S. Green Building Council. Govindbhai later received the USGBC Leadership Award from President Bill Clinton in November 2017 at Boston, USA. The building has recently secured LEED’s Platinum rating.

These gentlemen are indeed the finest examples of the people of the modern world for whom green is not an adjective but a verb. Whatever they do, they place Nature at the center of their enterprise. For them, the Earth is the ancestral mother of all life and they worship it with their work. Even before English environmentalist, James Ephraim Lovelock, proposed the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system, Indian ethos had advocated taking care of the Earth and all the forms of life it supports. 

I vividly remember when as a child I had recovered from a bout of fever, my mother made me offer a dried coconut, cut and filled with ghee and sugar, at the anthill under a huge tree. I now understand the meaning of that ritual. It was an offering to the unseen forces that supported life. As if to decode the ancient wisdom, in 2010-11 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a year-long seminar was organized to explore the study of the unseen.

Recently, Ashutosh completed his transdisciplinary research on Soor Sarovar Bird Sanctuary near Agra, doing a total economic valuation of ecosystem services. Ashutosh fastidiously established the various benefits that humans get from functional forest ecosystems. He cautioned against rampant and unbridled construction activities destroying such systems, especially urban and peri-urban forests. I see his work as a template for the future of habitat.

I had gone to Greece in 2006 with my wife and had spent a week there. We traversed from Athens to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in the hills and sailed in the Saronic Gulf to the Hydra, Poros and Aegina islands in a cruise boat. In Athens, one of the world’s oldest cities, with its recorded history spanning over 3,400 years, I roamed around as if in a trance, while my wife attended her conference. There were ruins with their stories everywhere – the Acropolis with the temples of Parthenon and Athena Nike, the Agora marketplace, and the Panathenaic Stadium, with a capacity for 60,000 spectators, constructed around the year 335 before common era.

I also visited the cave at the Philoppapos hill, where Socrates was tried and sentenced to drink poison for his refusal to give up his philosophical views. It looks so strange in today’s modern world of deal makings. Even a cursory study of world history reveals that in different times, people living in totally disconnected lands had got a consciousness upgrade. The first such, or rather well established, instance is the “Axial Age” some 2500 years ago. Socrates in Greece, Buddha in India, and Confucius in China were talking from a higher level of consciousness. Having accomplished his mission, Socrates left this world satisfied, what if by drinking poison. 

The term for religion used in the Indian civilization is “Sanatana Dharma” – an eternal order of righteousness. It is a constant ascent of consciousness since time immemorial conveyed through individual thinkers for articulation and communicated to the people around them. Lokmanya Balgangadhar Tilak (1856-1920) traced the origin of mankind to the Arctic Circle from where early humans traversed to the Northern parts of Europe and Asia in search of lands for new settlements around 10,000 years ago, possibly due to an ice deluge. This hypothesis is contrary to the Western narrative but is indeed quite credible.

The sky at the North Pole would have been seen by the early men as a heaven revolving around as a potter’s wheel. The stars would not rise and set but move round and round in horizontal planes during the long night of six months. The empty horizons, the whooping winds, the fire emerging out of stones… this stunning drama was recorded in several Vedic and Zoroastrian hymns, which looks weird to the people living away from the poles in the modern world, but that is how it was. Our ancestors knew that human beings are not only very small, but also very ephemeral. 

The order in ever-changing phenomenon was observed and recorded. It was called “Rta” by the Vedic people and seasons were therefore known as “Rtu” in most of the Indian languages. People lived together through consensus and cooperation. The ancient Indian, Greco-Roman and African societies were governed by the elites with widespread participation of the people. Then the game of thrones started. Empires started capturing territories, dividing people into winners and losers – the Mauryan, the Persian, and the Roman empires became the new world order. However, universal ideas keep flourishing beneath ever-changing political formations. 

In this period of empire-making, a businessman, Zeno from Citium, Cyprus, had a shipwreck, losing all his wealth and landed in Athens as a pauper. There, he got introduced to the ideas of Socrates, who had lived there a 100 years earlier. Zeno believed in the divine nature of the universe and the end goal of human life to achieve one’s highest version by living according to Nature. He started a school that attracted many young people. He used to address his students from a painted porch, “Stoa Poikile” in Greek. His teachings acquired the name Stoicism, or the philosophy of “The Porch.” One must live in the world like a person smiling on the “porch” after coming out of his house after a big fight with his spouse.

This disposition resonates with the term “Stithpragya,” introduced in verse 52 of the second chapter in the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita. It indeed refers to the mental disposition of one who is situated in divine consciousness. In the next 18 verses, such a person is elaborately described. For us ordinary people of the world, “Pragya” is wise, intelligent, and learned; whereas “Sthit” means grounded, anchored, stayed, steady, and firm. When combining both words “Stithpragya” means — a person who has disciplined the mind and senses, is firm in judgment, and free from any delusions. In other words, it refers to one who is contended, determined, and steady in life. 

In Stoic literature, we come across concepts like “Eudaimonia,” which means human flourishing, prosperity, and blessedness, perfectly matching a Stithpragya. And Stoics tell you to take responsibility, live expressing your highest self (“Arete” in Greek), and focus on what you can control, leaving the result to the higher power, as if explaining verse 47 of Chapter II in the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita in a different language to a different audience.

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।

मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि।।

Your right is for action alone, never for the results. Do not become the agent of the results of action. May you not have any inclination for inaction. 

An IT professional, Jaisooria, is my son, Amol’s friend. He lost his father, Dr. Kalpetta Balakrishnan, renowned writer and ex-secretary of Kerala Kalamandalam, and a humanist philosopher, in December 2020. Balakrishnanji taught at Sree Kerala Varma College at Thrissur and was a senate member in Cochin and Calicut Universities. When Amol told Jaisooria about my observation of a great parallel between Stoicism and the idea of Stithpragya postulated in the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita, Jaisooria told him that during his last days, his father was contemplating to write on this topic. Taking it as God’s will, I will take up this task now.

Religion and mythology have long been used as vehicles for philosophical teachings but in the Internet driven world, these vehicles seem to have gone out of fashion, if not turned obsolete. Universal philosophical themes – action without attachment, the perils of escapism, oneness with the universe, and the pitfalls of desires – do not need rituals, gurus and cults. They need to be practiced in everyday action. The power of philosophy to blunt the blows of fate is a credible tool at everyone’s disposal. 

I leave you with three cues from Marcus Aurelius: (1) If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it;  (2) Dig within. Within is the wellspring of Good; and it is always ready to bubble up, if you just dig; and (3) Most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you shall have more time, and more tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?” If you practice these simple suggestions, you will feel much better, and even more effective in whatever you are doing. 

I read a delightful book, “Clock Towers of India,” written by Dr. Yatindra Pal (YP) Singh. We share our Alma Mater – GB Pant University. I graduated in Mechanical Engineering and YP in Civil Engineering. Two years junior to me there, YP was studious, energetic and immaculate, unlike the playful, chaotic and scruffy me. YP won the Chancellor’s medal for his all-round excellence and later joined the Indian Railway Service of Engineers. So, when I read his book with some beautiful photographs, including the clock tower of our own university, a cascade of memories was activated.

It started with the rhyme, YP quoted in the book – Ghantaghar ki char ghadi, Charon mein zanzir padi – there are four clocks in the clock tower, all four are chained. It was the theme song of the freedom movement in North India, from where YP and I come. As most of the clock towers were constructed by the British or the local feudal lords supporting them, they became the butt of scorn. But after independence, the clock towers quickly turned into icons. We sang the Ghantaghar ki char ghadi… as our pathshala rhyme. Meerut, where I was born and schooled, had a majestic clock tower built by the prodigals of Hasan Mahmudi Kamboh, who captured the city of Meerut for Mahmud of Ghazni (971-1030). It was called Kamboh Gate, one of the nine gates of old Meerut. 

When I was admitted to Dev Nagari Inter College in 1965, I would walk under the tall three-laned structure. We could hear the clock tower’s bells in the night, when sleeping on the terrace, which was the norm during summer. Then the name Kamboh Gate was changed to Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Dwar, celebrating the fact that the great hero had visited Meerut in 1930 and addressed the public from here. The doughty manager of Menka Cinema, with his soldier-style moustache, had fought for the Azad Hind Fauz, we were told. He would stand in the lobby of the cinema with a cane, and I would give him a passing glance of deep admiration, carrying my heavy school bag on my back like a mountaineer. 

My father worked in Meerut Municipality, a furlong away from Ghantaghar. Once my father said that there would be a procession from the Municipality passing through the Ghantaghar and we decided to watch the spectacle. Three of my younger siblings, two brothers and a sister, along with our grandmother, climbed to the first level where there was a big watch shop. We spent about an hour there, but no procession came. It was my first chance to look down from a height and I was indeed captivated watching the traffic below. Later, when I looked down from the Eiffel Tower in 1985 and 2014, the Sears Tower in 1999, St. Louis Arch in 2000, Jin Mao Tower in 2003, and Burj Khalifa in 2015, every time, the Ghantaghar came alive reminding me of the indomitable spirit of my grandmother. 

The clock tower at the north end of the Palace of Westminster in London, famous as the “Big Ben,” was completed in 1859. It is perhaps the biggest and the best clock tower in the world. Big Ben’s clock was the largest and the most accurate four-faced striking and chiming clock in the world. In 2016, I spent good time there, looking at the details of its marvellous structure. It is 40 feet, about 12 meters, on each side and 320 feet height, just short of 100 meters. Hearing the 15-ton bell struck by a 450 pounds (about 200 kg.) hammer was surreal! 

YP writes in his book that the British commissioned clock towers at many places in India to show their authority to the commoners and to keep the morale of their troops high. But while a clock tower signifies power, the clock signifies a structured lifestyle. YP purchased his first wristwatch in 1981, after getting a job. I was lucky to have it from my father in 1971, when he was sending me off to Pantnagar. My father died at the young age of 49 in 1979 and I did not wear a wristwatch since then. A few years back, my friend, Jitu Patel, who lives in Nairobi, gifted me a 10,000-dollar Rolex watch, as he was meeting me on my birthday. But I am yet to wear it. 

Nowadays, everyone lives with a mobile and the time is so obvious. But, instead of making people more productive and organized in their lives, this awareness has cultivated a new pattern of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OBC) of checking time every moment. People fix alarms for TV shows, schedule gossip sessions and create cognitive garbage by megabytes every day. They can idle for hours together doing nothing and yet keep their senses and mind busy. I must share here what Charles Darwin, who gave the Theory of Evolution, famously said, “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” 

So, clock towers definitely played their own important role in creating awareness about time and helping people live life in a structured and purposeful way. As YP pointed out in the book, most of the clock towers in India are now dysfunctional, their clocks obsolete and unrepairable, and buildings depleted and encroached upon. A nation that does not respect its heritage, is often deprived of any glory in the future. Time moves like an arrow. It never returns. You can use it to hit a target, or shoot it into the dark. Eternity is indifferent to what are you doing with your life, like an envelope carrying a letter, not concerned with its content. 

It is time to value your time on this planet and use it properly. No one has lived forever and you would not be an exception. As time passes by you, you will find your body losing its strength, your mind getting dull and your spirit losing its buoyancy and ardor. No regret, no remorse, and no lamentation would be of any help later. Be aware of time, for it is your time. Rather than minding the hours and minutes, be aware your breath and your heartbeats. The inner clock must not run itself out before the outer one.

Of all the content on TV in last few years, a series, “Mr. Robot” on Amazon Prime Video, fascinated me the most. There is a character, “White Rose,” who is the leader of the Dark Army, a Chinese hacker group. She is a transgender woman masquerading as the male Zhi Zhang, the Chinese Minister of State Security. In one scene, she is shown surrounded by hundreds of expansive clocks of all kinds – from antique to the most modern – in her house. She says, “I mind the top one percent of the top one percent by hacking their time.” 

Mind your thoughts and emotions, and see how they are hacking you. Stay grounded in your body, stay connected to your past, your roots and your heritage and utilise their wisdom for creating a better future for yourself and the coming generations to live in. Every life is just an extension of what existed earlier and a genetic chronicle. I thoroughly enjoyed reading YP’s book and would certainly recommend it to everyone.

A Kaleidoscope is a fascinating little toy. I immensely enjoyed it and even made one in my woodcraft class, guided by my teacher “Tyagi Sir” in Dev Nagari Intermediate College, Meerut, in 1967. We took three mirror strips, tied them together as a triangle, put some broken colored pieces of glass bangles and packed them into a tube together. I used a bamboo piece for the tube. 

Wonderful symmetrical patterns are formed due to repeated reflection, presenting an ever-changing view when the tube is tilted. I strongly recommend that every child, before finishing school, must make one kaleidoscope and examine (scope) the formation of (edios) of beautiful forms (kalos). It would be a great primer to the Maya that this world is for the eternal observer of the soul. 

I have come to believe that we are all human kaleidoscopes, a walking collection of memories, like shattered glass with bits of crazy color churning inside our minds. Mundane little events keep happening as we grow through life. We experience them first as curious children; then, as adolescents bubbling with hormonal surges; then, as energetic, hardworking adults; then, as mature, wise, grown-up people; and finally, as a reflective older lot, a group to which I now belong. In September 2007, I accompanied Dr APJ Abdul Kalam on his first foreign trip after he relinquished the Presidency. He did not go to the United States as President and this visit was indeed long due. 

The “Fifty Years in Space” international conference at the California Institute of Technology provided the best fit. Dr Kalam included me in his speech writing team that included a punch line, “Planet Earth has twin human needs. One is the protection of the earth environment for living and the other is energy independence. The Earth is experiencing both stratosphere cooling (due to the ozone hole) and troposphere warming (due to increased greenhouse gases) …”

My friend, James Lupino, who was born to his Italian immigrant parents and grew up to be a brilliant electrical engineer, flew in from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to meet Dr Kalam.  We had a chance meeting with a famous singer-song writer, William “Smokey” Robinson, in the lobby of Hotel Indigo where Dr Kalam was staying. Robinson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. We had a tête-à-tête with the “star.” Robinson was friendly and open and when I asked why he was called Smokey, he said, “As a child, I loved cowboy movies. My uncle not only used to take me to these movies, he also gave me a cowboy name – Smokey Joe. If people asked me what my name was, I didn’t tell them my name was William, I told them my name was Smokey Joe.” And then he laughed with a tinge of tears in his eyes.  

Once free from the official engagements of Dr Kalam, I had a good time with James who drove me through Los Angeles – the iconic Hollywood sign on Mount Lee, Beverly Hills, and the famous shopping street Rodeo Drive nearby. We passed by the stunning billion-dollar Getty Center perched high atop Brentwood Hills. We of course did not enter and see Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises,” Claude Monet’s “Stack of Wheat,” and “The Abduction of Europa” by Rembrandt, famously displayed there. 

In the evening, we leisurely walked in Hollywood Boulevard, where more than 2600 five-pointed stars on the walkway celebrate famous stars. I had my first Corona beer in a Spanish restaurant there with a lemon slice stuck in the opening, giving the beer its wonderful taste. I don’t know if the Corona beer would still retain its immense popularity after the coronavirus pandemic. 

From LA, we flew to Minneapolis, transiting at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, Arizona. Situated in the vast Sonoran Desert that wraps around the northern end of the Gulf of California, Phoenix receives the most sunshine of any major city on Earth. I was fascinated to see the air traffic control tower, made of war-time underground fuel storage tanks welded together. You need audacity of imagination and engineering competence to accomplish such feats. In contrast, I found that in India, we are scared of going out of the box and even while innovating, the mind is gripped with fear. There are so many naysayers everywhere, waiting to see you fail. 

James lives in Minneapolis. He has been working with US Electronics there. I spent a few days in this beautiful city, spread on both banks of the Mississippi River. Minneapolis is home to five Fortune 500 companies, and together with the neighboring St Paul City, they make up the fifth-largest hub of major corporate headquarters in the US. We visited the United Health Group – a healthcare company with a revenue of more than $200 billion. I learned there that improved health outcomes can be achieved in spite of 40% lower treatment costs. I don’t see anyone even minding these matters in India. If you fall sick, it is your problem, and you are at the mercy of the healthcare business about what they do to you and how much you are asked to pay. 

Instead of bothering about your plans, your wishes, goals and ambitions, holding a telescope always, as if looking into future and writing the script for tomorrow, why not examine the kaleidoscope of your memories instead and you will find all that you need to know to become your best. You will feel a spring of energy inside, bathing you with enthusiasm. Dr Kalam, the NASA lecture, Smokey Robinson, the Mississippi River… are all unconnected and different, like broken glass pieces in a kaleidoscope. But they become one in my mind and I am able to communicate to you the beautiful picture they make together.

While writing a comment on my blog, “Hot Fudge, here comes the Judge,” 77-year-old veteran attorney, Bart Fisher, connected to his childhood in St. Louis and his passion for Baseball. My erstwhile colleague at Care Foundation, Arun Arramraj, recounted the American values as he had observed them during his study there in what could be the best description I had ever read. Dr Ramaiah, my student at Hyderabad University, now a professor at the University of Hail in Saudi Arabia, recollected that I had narrated the fudge story to his class in 2008. It is amazing to see how things get connected, creating positive energy! 

Habits of getting into arguments, always complaining, focusing on inadequacies, and lamenting about a half-empty glass are not only bad, but they are also dangerous. They keep you forever trapped in your miseries. So, in the New Year, learn to spend some quiet time with yourself, tilt the kaleidoscope of your memories and watch the beautiful patterns it makes with the strange combinations. You will find your signs, your cues, suggestions, guidance, help, whatever you are looking for, coming out from your inner being.

Here is the truth that I learnt a little late in my life. Not only is each one of us a speck of consciousness, but the whole universe is also consciousness itself. When you start feeling your consciousness, you will also start sensing the consciousness in your surroundings, in the form of vibes and subtle happenstances. You will indeed taste the bliss that God had embedded while creating life!