The Lesson I Carry Today

Hello dear friends,

I hope this blog finds you in a cheerful and thoughtful mood.

Sometimes, life gives us lessons through books, teachers, or personal experiences. But occasionally, a lesson arrives unexpectedly—through a person from our childhood, a forgotten memory, or a strange coincidence.

Today, I want to share one such unforgettable episode from my life. It taught me something I still believe deeply:

“We may not control everything that happens to us, but we can always control how we respond.”

❤️ A Friend from My Childhood

When I was a schoolboy, my routine was simple. After returning from school in the afternoon, I would have my lunch and sleep for a while. In the evening, I was allowed to go outside and play.

Those were innocent days.

I had a friend named Bhagwan Das, who was considerably older than me. He was a college student and helped his father run a small bookshop in the evening.

Gradually, I became a regular visitor to that shop.

He wasn’t merely a friend; for me, he was almost a walking encyclopedia. He would talk about everything under the sun. But what fascinated me most were his stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata.

His description of Karna was especially captivating. I would sit quietly, completely absorbed in his storytelling.

To my young mind, Bhagwan Das was an exceptionally knowledgeable, gentle and good-hearted person.

I admired him.

❤️ The Day Everything Changed

One evening, while we were sitting in the bookshop and chatting, something shocking happened.

Three or four policemen suddenly arrived.

Before I could understand what was happening, they tied a thick rope around my friend’s waist and put handcuffs on him.

Within minutes, a crowd gathered around the shop.

I stood there completely stunned.

Why were they taking him away?

Then I heard people whisper:

“He has committed a murder.”

My childhood mind simply could not accept it.

How could someone who knew so much, spoke so gently and appeared so good-natured, possibly kill somebody?

But life had other plans.

Soon afterward, my family moved from Khagaul to Ranchi, and that chapter of my childhood disappeared into the pages of memory.

Or so I thought.

❤️ Twenty-Five Years Later

Time passed.

I grew up, completed my education and joined the banking profession. The old incident gradually disappeared from my conscious memory.

Then, during a difficult phase of my career, I found myself struggling with several personal problems. I had appeared for a promotion interview with great hope, but unfortunately, I could not perform as well as I had expected.

I wasn’t selected.

For me, it was a painful setback.

I had worked hard, yet success had eluded me. Slowly, I began to believe that perhaps my destiny was against me.

During a period of leave, I went to Patna. I was mentally disturbed and often remained gloomy. One day, hoping to lift my spirits, I went to a cinema hall.

After watching the movie, I was standing near Gandhi Maidan waiting for a bus home.

Then something extraordinary happened.

A gentleman approached me and began looking at me carefully.

There was something strangely familiar about him.

Suddenly he asked,

“You are Bhola, aren’t you?”

Bhola was my childhood nickname.

I had almost forgotten that name.

I looked at him carefully.

Then came the words that transported me nearly twenty-five years into the past:

“I am Bhagwan Das.”

For a moment, the world seemed to stop.

My childhood came rushing back—the bookshop, the stories, the Mahabharata, Karna, the police, the handcuffs and the accusation of murder.

He smiled and said,

“Where have you disappeared, yaar?”

That one word—yaar—was enough to bring back an entire childhood.

❤️ The Truth Behind the Murder

I invited him for tea at a restaurant near India Hotel.

As we sat together, old memories came alive.

But one question had remained buried in my mind for twenty-five years.

Finally, I asked him directly:

“I always considered you an ideal person. You were calm, kind and knowledgeable. How could you commit murder?”

He took a deep breath.

Then he told me the story.

There had been a long-running dispute over agricultural land between members of their family. One night, he and his father were guarding their wheat field while irrigation work was underway.

It was around ten o’clock.

Suddenly, some relatives arrived with armed men. According to his account, they opened fire from a distance and threatened his father.

He became furious.

His father was being threatened, and he could not tolerate it.

There was a double-barrel gun on the watchtower. In anger, he fired into the darkness, intending, as he described it, to frighten the attackers away.

But fate intervened.

One of the bullets struck his cousin.

He died.

There were FIRs from both sides. Bhagwan Das was arrested, prosecuted and eventually sentenced to life imprisonment.

As I listened, my eyes filled with tears.

The man I had once thought of as simply a knowledgeable bookseller had lived through a tragedy far beyond anything I could have imagined.

And suddenly, my own problems seemed much smaller.

❤️ Karma or Destiny?

Our conversation naturally turned toward a question that has puzzled humanity for centuries:

What determines our life—our karma or our destiny?

I told him about my own disappointment.

I had worked hard, yet I had failed to achieve the promotion I wanted.

Perhaps, I thought, my luck was bad.

Bhagwan Das listened quietly.

Then he asked me:

“What do you do?”

I replied,

“I work in a bank.”

He smiled.

“Then you must know about bank lockers.”

“Of course,” I said.

Then he gave me an answer that has stayed with me ever since.

❤️ The Two Keys

He said:

“Every locker needs two keys to open.”

“One key is with the customer, and the other is with the bank manager.”

Then he looked at me and said:

“Your key is hard work.
The manager’s key is destiny.”

I was listening carefully.

He continued:

“You can keep putting your key into the lock. But unless the other key turns as well, the locker will not open.”

What a beautiful way to explain life!

We possess the key of effort.

We do not possess the key of destiny.

But that does not mean we should throw our key away.

Perhaps one day, at an unexpected moment, destiny will turn its key.

And the lock will open.

❤️ Don’t Stop Turning Your Key

That conversation changed my thinking.

Sometimes we work extremely hard and still fail.

• We apply for a job and don’t get selected.
• We attempt a business venture and face losses.
• We write, create, practice and improve—but success remains distant.

At such moments, it is easy to say:

“Perhaps it is not in my destiny.”

But that is precisely when we must be careful.

Failure may not mean that our journey is over.

It may simply mean that the second key has not turned yet.

As Thomas Edison famously demonstrated through his persistence, repeated failure can be part of the road toward success. And as the ancient wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita reminds us:

“You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions.”

The message is simple: Do your work. Keep moving. Don’t surrender your effort to uncertainty.

❤️ The Lesson I Carry Today

Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether that meeting at Gandhi Maidan was merely a coincidence.

Perhaps it was.

Perhaps it was destiny.

Or perhaps life simply has a mysterious way of bringing forgotten lessons back to us when we need them most.

That day, my childhood friend did not merely tell me his story.

He gave me a philosophy for life.

Karma is the key in our hand. Destiny is the key in God’s hand.

We cannot control the second key.

But we must never stop using the first.

“Do not wait for destiny to change your life.
Keep changing yourself through your actions,
and let destiny meet you somewhere along the way.”

Today, whenever I face disappointment, I remember that old bookshop, that unexpected meeting and those two keys.

And I remind myself:

Keep working.
Keep trying.
Keep believing.

Because we never know when the other key will turn.
And perhaps that is the most beautiful mystery of life.

Categories: infotainment

Tags: #भावना, #creativity, #Family, #Life, #Love, #wellness, fiction, writing