Today I saw my dad cry. HIs lips were quivering and a tear rolled down his cheek.
If this was an English novel it would be nothing out of the ordinary. But this is my fifty-five year old Indian father, for whom, crying was something I had only witnessed at my grandfather’s funeral.
My father told me a story today about his journey of getting into the Indian Institute of Technology—a story about a disadvantaged, scrawny Bihari in Bengal fighting against the world. It’s not that I have not heard this story before. In fact, it’s all I have heard about it for the last seventeen years of my life. Yet it in all of these years, my father never told me the two numbers that brought tears to his eyes: 711 and 757.
These numbers were the JEE ranks of two other boys in his class, who he vividly remembers ranked lower than him. These two boys frustrated him, blatanly expressed as he remembered asking himself: “How am I doing worse than them?”
Some would call this egotistical. But I call it hunger. A constant drive to be the best. And this feeling might be genetic, as I have a similar feeling in my heart when I lose. A twinge of regret followed by questions of what I could AND should have improved on. An emotion of it should have been me who won.
My father remembers this feeling about these two kids perfectly, drawing out the room he threw his pillow around in frustration. And as he told me about the second-hand books he traveled around India to collect or the money he gathered from working miscellaneous jobs for books, my own hunger is reemphasized. My life and drive is framed into perspective.