It's a good world out there....

"Hi Mona. Hope life is wonderful and interesting for you. Life is how we view it. It's a good world out there, only thing is we don't always notice."

My dad, like parents of many Indians my age, was born before the partition, grew up in a large middle class family in a small town, and had very simple ideologies in life. The world I've grown up in is a lot different than the one he had experienced in his childhood days. A large part of that is because of him, and the sacrifices he made for our family. Ofcourse, modern day ameneties such as cell phones, computers, the internet, cable television, etc, etc have also contributed significantly to this difference. Things that my dad would probably never have heard of while growing up. Things that my dad could never fully accustom himself to in his lifetime. Things that I can't imagine my life without. It took him more than a couple of months to be able to use the contact list to find someone's number, and then make a call from his gifted cell phone. Cable TV, to him, meant being able to watch more than one news channel. Inspite of numerous coaching classes repeated over several years, he was never able to successfully type and send out an email, never able to take a printout of a document on his own. Which is why I was both surprised and ecstatic to receive an sms from him one day. Not a 3 syllable message like "where.r.u." or "com3.hom3.sooom" but 4 whole sentences, in words perfectly separated by single spaces, each sentence ending with a dot, each new sentence starting with a capital letter. More than the message itself being so beautiful, what touched me most was the amount of time and effort he would have put into typing, losing, again typing, erasing and retyping out that entire sms, just to be able to reach out and communicate with me.

As always, you were right, dad. It sure is a good world out there, but its not nearly as wonderful with you no longer in it.