The above photograph was taken on the 1st January of a specific year. The venue: Chitragupta Temple, near the New Delhi railway station. The people in the picture (from Left to Right) are:
Sanjay Goyal – FB ID – https://www.facebook.com/sanjay.goyal.1238292
Sukanta Mishra – FB ID – https://www.facebook.com/sukant.mishra.94
Pavan Kumar Vijay FB ID – https://www.facebook.com/pkvijay and
Raja Gopal Reddy
And if I correctly recall, and reconstruct the events from my feeble memory, the person who took the photograph or the camera man was my brother late Raja Krishna Reddy. The day of the marriage is the same day as the birthday of the groom Sukanta Mishra.
Now let me tell you briefly about each of these people:
Sanjay Goyal: He is the person on the extreme left and holding a tea cup. He is a close friend and my classmate during the LLB days. One remarkable thing I must state is that his face has not changed at all after all these years. I had written few lines about him earlier. You can read it again at: https://shitwhole.com/experiences/sanjay-goel/ Today he is an established name in the hotel industry, lives in Gurugram, Haryana.
Sukanta Mishra – hails from the state of Kalinga (I refuse to call it as Odisha) was my roommate and the de facto president of the Jubilee Hall Illegal Residents Association (JHIRA), a keen aspirant of the Indian Civil Services examination. He could have easily cracked the coveted IAS, had he not fallen in love! Love changes everything, including life! He met his life’s Asha. He is the groom of the marriage we are attending.
Pavan Kumar Vijay – from Kasganj, UP. He was my hostel mate, class mate and lovely friend. If you want to learn how to appear busy without doing anything, then you must contact this ever-green hero. He knows how to dress well; a very innocent man. He had a light sky-blue color Bajaj Chetak scooter. Today he has his own business, a reputed speaker, a wizard in financial management and the sole owner of the Kasganj Airlines. He lives in Delhi.
Raja Gopal Reddy – he is a man who has nothing to lose! Hails from the land of Rajnikanth and a saambar eater! This is the way all my North Indian friends look at me. I was having a thick beard due to warts on my face. You can also call them as some sort of permanent pimples, which made shaving impossible without bleeding. Hence, he decided to grow the beard to hide them. Thanks to a great Homeopath, whose month-long medicines made the warts permanently go away. He does these days, basically nothing in the field of insurance. He attempts unsuccessfully tries to invent new methods of wasting time! Lives in Hyderabad.
Years passed! Life flew. There was almost no contact between us. We followed our destinies. We all had our share of ups and downs in life. Much water has flown under the bridge. When we look back, and I am sure all in the photograph above will agree, we find our lives empty! We have not achieved anything. We remained as we were, unchanged and till eternity.
Except Pavan Kumar Vijay, we all will still fight for a drag of the Wills Gold Flake cigarette. This photograph proves beyond reasonable doubt that nothing changes in the world, including the way we think!
About the Author
Dr. K. Raja Gopal Reddy is a seasoned internationally qualified Insurance professional. What you are reading here, may not answer all the questions we have, but has the absolute power of asking unsettling questions which increase the interest in the strange world, and show the contradictory wonders lying just below the surface of the commonest things of life. Look at this disturbing but beautiful thought of Friedrich Nietzsche “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”.
Dr. Reddy can be reached at: raja66gopal@gmail.com
