There’s no one else like Ma

In our school days, we used to celebrate Independence and Republic days with our Principal unfurling the national flag and we being given small packets of sweetmeats. Coinciding with the birthday of our scholarly President Dr S Radhakrishnan, we started celebrating Teachers Day. Of course, the birthday of our first Prime Minister, Pandit Nehru is celebrated as children’s day all over the country.

As we grew older, the trend of celebrating Valentine’s Day started, but as I light heartedly lamented in one of my earlier blogs, by the time the trend of celebrating this romantic day took roots, we had outgrown that age by becoming settled professionals.

And now if you look at the social media and Internet, probably each calendar day of the year is dedicated to some cause or event. There’s environment day, brother day, Father’s Day and whole lot of other miscellaneous days. But how can we have Mother’s Day, when to my mind all 365 days of the year are Mother’s Days only. Yes but there’s one difference ! While for a mother 365 days and 24 hours of each day are dedicated to her children, probably children may require a day to remember their mothers. They are chasing careers, material objects, higher status in society, life abroad et al and in the process may forget to check on the well being of mothers; but mothers never forget their children. These successful careerists would be aspiring to lead mega corporations, but mothers are still worried about these children’s diet, rest, tension etc!

As someone put it very succinctly in the context of our relationship with our mothers-

Yeh hamara farz nahin

Hamara karz hai

The above is loosely translatable as:

We are not duty bound to our mothers

We owe our lives to our mothers!

While the above is a very deep thought and requires an aptitude of a great poet, which I am not, yet in my own humble way I pay my tribute to mothers in the following manner :

We are social animals and have friends and relations galore

But while asleep in mothers lap there’s no requirement of anything more

When something hits us, it hurts us badly

But it hurts our mothers much more, sadly

Because God couldn’t come in person to each one of us

He gave us mothers to be with each one of us

Temple, mosques and churches have gods to whom we go

Yet mothers are at home a fact that we all ought to know

Career, salary, status are all transient

In this world only mother’s love is permanent!

Happy Mother’s Day.