Some people enter our lives without announcement. They do not arrive knowing that they will change us, nor do we realise, when we first meet them, how important they will eventually become. Years later, when we look back at the long journey of life, we discover that their presence quietly altered its course. Sir and Ma'am are two such people in my life.
"Sir and Ma'am"—that is how I have always addressed them. I cannot remember ever thinking of them differently. To the world, they may be professionals who have excelled in their respective fields. To many, they may be mentors, friends or acquaintances. But somewhere along the journey of my life, they became something much more to me. I began looking up to them with the affection and reverence with which a child looks towards his parents.
I first met them when I was studying in Class IX. At that age, one hardly understands the significance of the people one encounters. We do not know which conversations will be forgotten and which will remain with us for a lifetime. Looking back today, however, I consider that meeting one of the most fortunate accidents of my life.
They nurtured me, cared for me, guided me and, above all, believed in me.
That last part mattered enormously.
There was a period when I was doing badly in my studies. In the world of a school-going child, marks can acquire a disproportionate importance. A report card can suddenly become a measure not merely of one's academic performance but, unfortunately, of one's worth. When you repeatedly fail to meet expectations, you slowly begin to internalise other people's assessment of you. The world starts calling you average, and eventually you begin calling yourself average too.
Sir and Ma'am refused to do that to me.
When the evidence available on my report cards perhaps gave them every reason to lower their expectations, they did exactly the opposite. They continued to repose an almost unreasonable amount of faith in me. They seemed to see possibilities in that struggling schoolboy which the boy himself could not see.
Their patience carried me through those years.
I particularly remember the letters Ma'am used to write to me when I was away. Whenever I felt low, defeated or unsure of myself, I would return to those letters. Long before motivational messages began arriving every morning on mobile phones, I had my own handwritten source of encouragement.
One sentence from one of those letters has remained with me all these years:
"You are not an average student and should never consider yourself as one. We both want to see you stretch your wings and fly as high as you can. We are there with you."
I do not know whether Ma'am remembers writing those words. For her, perhaps, they were words of encouragement written naturally to a child she cared about. For me, they became something else altogether.
They became a refuge.
There are moments in life when borrowed confidence keeps us alive until we can develop confidence of our own. Someone believes in us so persistently that, eventually, we begin to wonder whether perhaps they are right. Their faith becomes a bridge between the person we are and the person we might someday become.
Ma'am's words did precisely that for me.
Over the years, however, I learnt from Sir and Ma'am not merely through what they told me but also by watching the lives they themselves lived.
Ma'am's journey has always fascinated me. She completed her M.Sc. in Microbiology and could have chosen the comfort and predictability of a conventional career. Instead, she chose to work with an NGO dealing with health issues in Gadchiroli, one of India's remotest districts. It was there that she married her colleague—Sir.
Together they built their family and raised two daughters, Sampada and Sanchita, both of whom excelled in their studies and went on to pursue exceptional careers of their own.
In time, Sir and Ma'am established a pathological laboratory. For most people, that would have represented arrival—a profession, a family, a stable livelihood and a respectable place in society. One could have comfortably settled there.
Ma'am did not.
She went back to studying. She studied law, entered legal practice and established herself as a prominent lawyer in the Sessions Court at Gadchiroli. Even that achievement did not become her final destination. At a stage when she was already doing remarkably well in her legal profession, she once again chose uncertainty over comfort.
She prepared for the judicial examination, succeeded and entered the judiciary.
Today, she serves as a Principal District Judge. Along the way, she has held several important judicial responsibilities and, from everything I have witnessed and known of her, has attempted to do justice to every responsibility entrusted to her.
Her journey has had a profound influence on me because I watched much of it unfold while I myself was growing up. I saw someone refusing to allow an earlier achievement to become an excuse for intellectual stagnation.
From Ma'am, therefore, I learnt the meaning of those famous words associated with Steve Jobs: stay hungry, stay foolish.
For me, they do not mean perpetual dissatisfaction. They mean retaining the courage to remain a student of life. They mean refusing to believe that one's possibilities have been exhausted merely because one has achieved a degree of professional success. Ma'am taught me that there can always be another book to read, another examination to attempt, another road to explore and another version of oneself waiting to be discovered.
Sir taught me something equally valuable, but very different.
If Ma'am taught me aspiration, Sir taught me equilibrium.
He has always seemed to possess a certain groundedness—a belief in stability, simplicity and the ability to remain content without becoming complacent. Through him I gradually understood that not every ambition in life will be fulfilled, and that an unfulfilled ambition need not become a lifelong source of bitterness.
Life is not a race in which we must constantly look at the person ahead of us and lament the distance between them and us. There will always be people who have travelled farther. There will also be many who, for reasons of circumstance, opportunity or fate, have remained behind. Neither comparison should determine the worth of our own journey.
There is dignity in aspiration, but there is wisdom in contentment.
Sir embodies that balance for me.
He has now closed the pathological laboratory that he ran for years. These days, much of his happiness comes from the farm he lovingly nurtures. He has his own poetic vision for it. He dreams of developing it into a farmhouse where, after retirement, friends can come and stay with him—away from the noise and hurry of ordinary life, amidst green fields and trees, waking to the sound of birds.
There is something deeply beautiful about that dream.
We spend so much of our younger lives imagining success in terms of titles, positions, money and recognition. Perhaps with age we slowly discover that success can also mean having a patch of earth you love, a few trees whose growth you have watched, friends with whom silence is comfortable, and enough time to listen to birds in the morning.
In that sense, Sir and Ma'am have taught me two seemingly opposite but ultimately complementary lessons: never stop dreaming, and never postpone living.
Behind Ma'am's extraordinary professional journey, I have also watched Sir's quiet support. He never needed to occupy the centre stage. As she moved from microbiology to social work, from the pathological laboratory to law, and from advocacy to the judiciary, he stood beside her. Sometimes the most consequential contribution a person makes to another's success cannot be written on a résumé. It consists simply of saying: Go ahead. I am here.
Perhaps that is what companionship at its finest means.
As I look back today, I increasingly realise that human beings are never entirely self-made.
We often like the expression "self-made" because it celebrates effort, perseverance and individual agency. Those things certainly matter. But none of us is constructed out of our efforts alone. We are also made by the affection we receive, the opportunities someone creates for us, the teacher who refuses to give up on us, the friend who stays during difficult times, the stranger who opens a door, the parent who sacrifices silently, and sometimes by a handwritten letter telling a struggling child that he is capable of flying.
Our lives are made as much by encounters as by endeavours.
Perhaps that is why I think of Sir and Ma'am as one of the most beautiful accidents of my life.
They did not know, when they met a Class IX boy, what course his life would eventually take. Neither did I. They simply chose to care. They chose to encourage. They chose to remain patient when patience was needed most. And somewhere in that process, without consciously setting out to do so, they helped build a human being.
Years have passed. The schoolboy grew up. Life took him through many places, institutions, successes, disappointments and responsibilities. But some things remained.
Even today, speaking to Sir and Ma'am does something peculiar to me. Their words can still awaken the confidence of that teenager who once needed someone to tell him that his present difficulties did not define his future.
And Ma'am's old words remain with me:
"Stretch your wings and fly as high as you can. We are there with you."
Perhaps I have spent much of my life trying to live up to that faith.
Whatever little I have been able to achieve, whatever confidence I have gathered along the way, and whatever dreams I still dare to pursue contain, somewhere within them, a little of Sir and Ma'am.
Life teaches us that some debts cannot—and perhaps should not—be repaid. To repay a debt is to close an account. But how does one close an account of affection? How does one calculate the value of confidence given to a child when he had very little of his own?
Such debts are not repaid.
They are carried forward.
Perhaps the best way of honouring those who believed in us is to believe in someone else when their own faith is failing—to tell another struggling young person, with the same conviction with which Ma'am once told me:
You are capable of more than you presently imagine.
Sir and Ma'am entered my life as an accident.
They stayed as a blessing.
And if there is one thing I wish they always knew, it is simply this: the faith they placed in a struggling schoolboy was not lost. It travelled with him. It still does.
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