A beautiful life

 

The third option

I have remained in touch with Mr. S, my Physics teacher during my high school days (eleventh and twelfth grade). He was somewhat of a misfit. His knowledge was vast. His thirst for all things unknown could be easily spotted as we occasionally drifted away during his lectures. We were too young to understand. That vacant stare out of the skylights wondering – so much out there, so little do we know and more importantly, to little scope to know.

TV was new in society with only one channel - state sponsored Doordarshan. Computers were things the size of entire buildings, limited to a few state-owned agencies and other organizations that could afford them. A land phone was a rare luxury limited to a handful of people in an entire city of half a million. The Internet? LOL.

Fast forwarding three decades. Mr. S has two sons. Both traveled from the small town of Durgapur to Bremen in Germany to complete their college education. Nothing to be uber surprised. Except for what they chose to study and how they decided to carve out a space in a society obsessed with expensive suits and fortunes in stocks and tech startups that add very little value to society. Therein lies the difference between a culture of corporatism, if that is a word, and the third option.

They got us while we were in an impressionable young age. I wouldn’t blame them. Times were tough. The thing that mattered most was a job when you got out of college. As they screwed it right into our heads.

This kid, while in college, found his Nirvana in a relatively unfamiliar field of acoustics – not the Bose kind. But under water. Armed with that expertise, he roamed the seas and oceans in search of sunken mines from WW2, following the signals of humpbacks, strange shapes formed by sound from the bottom of the Arctic to submarines whose tragic ends begged for answers. That is a life to be led. To be savored, to breathe in full, to explore known unknowns, to hear what others don’t see. I and countless others lost ourselves behind comfortable desks or cubicles, staring at computer monitors. At some point we get to bigger desks and bigger rooms and even bigger titles. We control the lives of hundreds of others struggling in the desks and cubes we left behind. In the end, that young kid grows older with a weathered face and a smile worth a million Mona Lisas as he takes the next dive from a boat into unknown depths of an azure blue ocean. A life led to its fullest. Whether you watch those strange creatures of the depths or listen in on the Flying Dutchman’s captain, Jacques Custeau is in your blood. Hats off.