Losing a Close Colleague

This is not an obituary. This is a cry of pain.

For the first time, I am feeling the depressing weight of the pandemic truly weighing on me. I realise that I am exceptionally shaken by the heart breaking news that came crashing down on us last evening. Tridib Roy Chowdhury, the centre manager for the MINRO Centre in IIIT-B left for the heavenly abode yesterday. Suddenly.

Tridib wasn't the kind of a guy you would expect to go like this. Tridib was in his late fifties, but was extremely fit. An avid sportsman and cycling enthusiast. By his looks, he could have given any young person in his early thirties a run for his money. You read the obituaries that came pouring on Facebook yesterday, and you know what he was: and IITian, an inspiration, a mentor, a successful corporate, an exceptional human being.

His going like this hurts at many levels. Firstly, this is my first experience of losing a close colleague like this. I had got many opportunities of interacting closely with him over the last one and half years. I had seen how hard he was trying to bring in the positive energy, the movement, the result-orientedness that drives the corporate world, into our laid back academic world. I had found his energy infectious. And all the accolades that came along through the Refreshable Braille Display project had largely to do with him.

Secondly, It wasn't COVID, or an accident, or something of that kind for God's sake! Seeing a fit person like him succumbing to a freak cardiac incident fills my heart with a chill. If keeping fit doesn't safeguard you from your heart giving up on fine day just like that, then what does? I tend to lose my enthusiasm about the effectiveness of a healthy life-style in preventing your life from getting cut short from something we typically associate with bad lifestyle. It's really disappointing.

Thirdly, I realise how inept, unequipped we are in feeling -- leaving alone expressing -- our shock and pain! For an hour after getting the news (from Facebook), I sat there alone in my living room: numb, dazed and stupefied. Both my wife and my son were in two different rooms doing their things. They had no way to know how nerve-wracking those moments were for me. My education, my 'status', has robbed me of my ability to scream out, to accept that I am suffering, to acknowledge even to myself that I am in pain, to cry for help.

And finally, the ominous reality of the pandemic seems to finally dawn on me. It's not an open wound, not a raging burn. It's a slow, dull pain which is continuously at work inside us. It has shifted the ground level of our despair just that much higher so that one or two incidents of this kind will throw many of us over the edge. Government figures will write these off as collaterals, co-morbidities. Not COVID deaths.

A brief moment yesterday brought me the realisation how alone we are away from our near and dear ones, how helpless and vulnerable we are against the power of fate, how ridiculous it is to centre your life around thoughts of the future, and to make too much of our glorious past and present. At that moment, I would have given anything to have a shoulder to cry on, a heart that would know my feelings, a voice that would tell them to me without my having to find my voice, a reassurance that it was OK to feel sad and afraid.

At this moment, I am looking for a bunch of friends to huddle together with and whimper and cry. Nothing else!