Moon’s fall

Isaac Newton’s question if the apple falls , does the moon also fall, started the mathematics to calculate this fall and things related to that. A lot of questions that i had during my engineering days about  why i m studying calculus . Why differentiation and integration? what’s the use of it. My professors although invested so much time in teaching formulas but never thought it was necessary to let students know why they need to study calculus. Thanks to internet later, in one of the videos of michio kaku , he started talking about newton, then his observation of apple’s fall, then his thought of possibility of fall of moon and how it led to start of calculus. Otherwise this question would have stayed there forever.

Another question that may come to reader’s mind would be, why i m discussing this? i came across michio’s video where he was sharing his thoughts about God and in same video, he shared opinion of Einstein about God. He explains ,Einstein believed that universe with such  precise systems and laws was definitely not a mere accident ,it was created by a source that allows things to work ,the way we see them working from human systems to cosmos.

I m born in hindu family and my mother has taught religious beliefs from the very beginning. I think i read Gita in very young age. A lot of things in it were beyond my comprehension at that time. I studied many other religious books as well later. But God was in my thought process from very beginning but usually reference was one of the hindu Gods, always whenever i thought about God.

When you go to school, if you start studying science , it starts creating conflict with God and his presence. If you start following physicists, most of them don’t believe in God as science works on proof and provable steps that can be taken to prove a theory. From those standards and reasons physicists could not create any experiments to prove God’s presence and hence no faith in God. But then michio and his string theory in his own words proves the presence of Gods and his belief that God is probably a mathematician of highest possible precisions.

I have lived a life, where i really did not need provable steps to confirm God’s presence. A decade back, i met with a severe car accident, it was  midnight, i was probably lying in the pool of my own blood , what i saw, is what i remember as short dream, people pulling me or doing something, i thought i was having some fight with arrogant people of Delhi in my dream. Then i got into deep sleep and came to senses, when someone was pulling a string that was attached to skin on my face, on other side some one doing something with my teeth with some tool and having a casual talk to the person who was pulling the string that was hurting me.

Once those guys left, i realized i was in a hospital. There was some sticky material in my hair ,on back side of my head due to which i could not make much of movement but i could see my whole white T shirt had become red, my pants and shoes were all red too and the sticky material was my blood that probably was drying .

I have been a problem child and met with many smaller accidents and injuries, in playfields of cricket, football or martial arts, where i have broken my bones, some times  my fingers or hand or foot but this was beyond all that. In Delhi i used to live alone, i checked my pockets, my phone was missing, my wallet was missing. i just had some cash in my pocket which people might have missed to check.

After i came to my senses ,i understood something terrible has happened, i asked  one of the guys present there ,to help me get to my home. He brought in a taxi and got me to my place. i called my brother who came and realized how bad it really was. Next day me and him went to a private hospital again. He also got my family who lived in another state.  Five days later they did operation to put my broken jaw back in place. They hung it with wires inside my mouth, in an operation that went for 4 to 5 hours, so my mouth was sealed for four months and i could only take liquid diet. Four months on bed and i came face to face with my self. lot of questions, lot of self hate. when your whole body can move and you can’t take your own saliva in. Its probably one of the worst feelings you may have.

Ten years after that accident i see the whole thing and see that as my rebirth. if you look at the condition of the car, you cant believe the driver could make it and really survive. People of delhi are ,for that matter any metro have become apathetic to almost everything, they would just carry on with their own life does not matter what happens around them. They don’t even come to rescue during day light and my scenario was midnight, when everybody is in their sleep. That little dream when people were irritating me and pulling me due to some fight, was in reality an act of rescue, they were pulling me out of car to save me. My car’s wind shield glass had gone into right side of my face and had broken my jaw and i was bleeding heavily from my nose. I always wondered, if none of them would have come to get me out of car. how come those people helped me in the midnight when they were expected to sleep? I could have just be in my car, the way i was, bleeding heavily through my nose. Would i have reached hospital? You know the answer, I know the answer. I know from where I have come.

So every time question about god’s presence comes into my mind, after i hear someone questioning his presence. I go back to my rebirth. When i was not even aware, what had happened to me. I was helpless. I could not ask for anybody’s help either, how can unconscious man do that. Even in that state ,if that force, took care of me, got me all the help and allowed me to survive. I remain grateful to it. Its the same rebirth point i go back to, whenever i think i m in deepest problems. It allows me to remember, if that force can get me out of that , this current problem is nowhere close to that. It gives me immense power to take on anything in life.

I also realize that everything after my rebirth is a gift, every breath i take is a bonus. The guy who met with that accident and all his evils were gone in that accident. The guy who was reborn , was given a chance to redeem himself and fix things he had broken and be a better man. Everything that looked impossible were given to me subsequently .

Lot of people may think, this whole thing was a fluke accident and everything a coincident. But these coincident are really frequent to me. Two years after the accident, i got married ,was working for one of the best companies in the world. Then 5 years later, i was gifted with a son, 2 years later i realized that my son was in the ASD (autism spectrum disorder)spectrum.

Then i saw another incident. Due to ASD my son haven’t started speaking yet. He was 4 years old and i was in a busy shopping mall with my wife and son, in the queue of point of sale, to make payment for the shopping. Suddenly, i realized my son was not around me. Next realization , he was no where near. I started running to all his usual spots, his chocolate point, his toy point and all such points but he was at none of them.

My mind was about to explode ,with avalanche of thoughts, he cant even say his name. He is so peculiar about his food, his everything , we know how we handle lot of things. If he is lost, how will he tell his name. He shows all his tantrums with all the right in this world over his parents, while doing everything, how will that happen ,if a stranger finds him and he has to live with a stranger. how a stranger will handle him. Oh God what will happen to him. God can i live without him. Can he live without his mother or me?

I was running back to point of sale counters and i heard announcement, Mr. Singh, Suraj singh your son has been found, please come back.  I ran to them and saw him and hugged him with all my heart. I could not believe this whole miracle. Later my sister in law told me that, she found him outside shopping mall near road crossing. I do not know how i would have lived, if this could have gone any other way then it is in present.

There are so many such coincidents, that I have stopped counting them now. When i think about this power which is always with me, around me and try to view from the eyes of science and understand . I m realizing that ,all the laws of physics and sciences are not just laws of physics, they are laws that physicist and scientists have discovered after studying the behavior of things around us from cosmos to things on the earth.

But they have not created those laws, they found them after observations, but they have been there since time unknown.  By accident? that’s where super logical minds of physicist stop seeing logic and say everything is an accident a big bang. Well, no mystic has ever been able to solve that for logical proof demanding scientists ever, unless you can transcend the boundaries of hard evidence to something which is around you, but is invisible.

Few clues for hard evidence seekers, has anybody seen love but its there, you know it, i know it ,that its there ,but can any body prove its existence with repeatable scientific steps. You know the answer.  I m not writing this to question scientists, i myself is a student of it. I m also not trying to impose my opinion on anyone. Just want people to have open mind and experience few things from soul not just through five senses.

After years while studying cryptography , i came across quantum cryptography and how its impossible to break integrity of data encrypted using it and not get detected. As usual as follow up on an interesting topic like quantum physics,i again went through quantum theory and found scientists amazed by facts about particles, that they can be in two places at same time , it can be a wave and a particle as well. Again , is that just a coincidence? Such a beautiful thing, is that just result of an accident, a coincidence?

some day we will have the answers to things we cant see and measure, for now we can enjoy these mysteries, as that makes it even more beautiful

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Experiences of a father

living with my autistic son is like being on a beautiful roller coaster ride. My boy can’t communicate using any verbal languages yet , Although he speaks lot of Gibberish.He is 4 and half right now. When he was 2 years old, he used to say few words but somehow he stopped building the vocabulary and stopped saying those words any more. I live with my wife and my son far away from my parents. We used to blame our own selves for his lack of speech initially and too much of TV . Then later ,on recommendation of his kindergarten teacher we took him for physco-analysis, they said its a border line autism and recommended occupational therapy first speech therapy later. Then it can go on simultaneously.

I had never heard this term before but sounded so bad and negative at that time , I could not stop crying ,probably whole night as my dreams about him were very different. I had made colossal mistakes in my life and I always thought, I would tell what not to do to my kids and how to be a better person. There were things I did really well, I wanted to pass that on to my kids but at that moment , all seemed very hazy. With time I became stronger , first accepted what it was and then tried to understand what it is.

Even though ,they say its borderline autism but the problems ,which are sensory issues are bit difficult to understand by a non autistic person, so I try to imagine how it is my son really feels when he keeps jumping at times or feels very excited when he listens to music and moves his hands in certain way. I sometimes also try to imagine, how does it feel, when you want to say something but you can not as you have not learned to talk yet, how do you say what you really want. What options you have, for such a young kid probably one option is to cry as that’s what he learnt in these initial years. Even then if nobody listens to you, try crying harder or hit your self, probably they would understand what you want. But imagining this clearly explains that’s its not easy for him yet.

To understand things better, I had few meetings with the physiotherapist, who does Occupational Therapy, she explained why OT was needed, it was to satisfy his sensory needs, there were swings, certain toys, trampoline and other stuff. Objective was to satisfy his sensory needs, once that’s done then he will sit peacefully and follow the commands of the teacher, do the learning activities.

Since these two key words “sensory needs” became two very important words for my son’s life, they became even more important to me, I wanted to understand what it really means, internet my best friend and books my next best friend helped me in understanding it better.

For us,non-autistic people, all sounds are processed properly and we can feel them as they are. But it may not be true for autistic people, they may hear it much more amplified version of what we hear,an indicator would be you are listening same sound and you are fine but they will put their hands on their ear as they cant bear the noise.

Autistic people can be under sensitive or over sensitive to certain things e.g. Touch, some can be oversensitive and would not let you touch but someone like my son is under sensitive to touch and wants his Mom to hug him all the time or fortunately me as well , as a gift I get his hugs as well.

There are many such things, all these are sensory needs, so first job as parents becomes is to understand what are those needs and then help him satisfy them through OT or through daily life activities ,so that they are at peace and can focus on learning usual stuff of life including speaking.

He has therapies in two separate places OT at one location and speech therapy on another, my wife ,who learnt driving just for this reason, has been doing this exercise on daily basis, gets really tired by the end of the day. Its not easy on eyes seeing both them tired when I get back home.

Speech therapist, for some time suggested a backup plan ,till he starts speaking, use of sign language to communicate about certain tasks like open something, carry him etc. He started doing that , it was good see him expressing him that way as a first relief measure. But I wanted him to speak, so after some time I discussed my concern with my wife. We waited for the new session of his special school to deal with this.

Before this session, we put him in another day care for few days as my wife was also doing some training as well and she could not be with him for couple of hours in a day for a week. We saw major change in his behaviour , he was getting irritated very easily and at times violent as well hitting himself. we immediately got him out of that school, we could not understand why but after that he was fine no daily melt downs, no tantrums.

After few months , his new special school session started, objective of this school is to get kids ready for usual schools, with continuous OT and speech therapy at one location along with social interactions.

But the problem also came back when he started going to this school, he will be fine in the school but once he is back he will have tantrums after every few hours, you couldn’t say no to him, if you did he will get violent and start hitting himself. It was so bad that you really cant see when he hits himself as a parent.

When we talked to his teacher in the school ,she suggested few things and guessed that he is attached to his mother so much that ,for these few hours in school spent away from his mother ,he expresses his anger later in the day. We did understand that and followed the plan given by the teacher.

His self hitting continued for few days every time he got angry. For parents this could be very stressful, we went to vacation for a week to a hill station near by , his behaviour was fine for few days but on last day he became very irritated and got into same mood as we were seeing back home.

As a father you , you may miss few things as you may be pre-occupied with work all the time.I did not observe his bowel movement frequency. During the vacation, I observed that or probably in correct words ,I heard my wife first time when she said that this frequency was two days and when I saw he doing it , I could see how bad his constipation was and how painful it was for him. Probably on his day of potty ,he was scared of that very moment ,when he has to go through this process and may be that’s what makes him really angry.

This turned out to be true, when we came back home. We consulted with doctors about his constipation problem and worked on his eating habits and amount of water that he should have per day. Gradually his constipation problem resolved and he once again became his usual happy boy.

Many times , we go by hearsay that autistic kids have mood swings and tantrum problems. But at times truth is far from those hearsays, it could be related to real problem, we need to observe very carefully as your child if he or she does not speak yet, onus is on you to find out what’s the problem is.

It is difficult and stressful for parents but that can be managed using different means, which I will discuss later in my upcoming posts.

 

 

 

Being Grateful

Million Thanks to almighty for this Greatest Gift.

Mom and Son

My little naughty boy, in his playful mood.

This may be little late for thanksgiving ,I guess its never too late to say thanks to world or people or God. So this thought came to me to say thanks and be grateful to this world I am in.

Earlier ,I had different thoughts about life, I used to think why my life has been so difficult. Why it  is  so smooth for others , a life  without difficulties. Every time I ran into  bad situation, I used to crib about things, crib about people in my life and fate .

Recently , one of my friends lost his new born baby , when I met him after he came back from the break to recover from this  . He was inconsolable. It was hard to find words to console him. Does not matter what I would say, it would all be meaning less in the face of such a tragedy. After he recovered, we had many conversations around this. During one of the conversations, he said that he feels that all the bad things happen only to him. This was kind of a common breaking point between me and him, where I also felt the same about certain things that happened in my life.

After few months of marriage, when my wife conceived for first time, we ran into a problem and after a long struggle in hospital, we could not carry that any further and lost that opportunity of being parents. After an year, we were again expecting and when I got this news, we were travelling and since we had a bad experience in past, I got medical test done and we again had some issue and doctor advised not to travel via road.  We travelled through air and reached home in Bangalore. After that, things got in control with the help of doctors and we finally had our son.

For 2 years, I was the happiest person in the world. All the progress points of my child were up to the mark.  After 25th month my son still had not started speaking. He was going to a play school, his teacher said your child is little different from other children as he does not listen to what she says and has a poor eye contact. She suggested us to visit child specialist.

Child specialist, who were basically physcoanalysts , They did certain tests and finally told us that my son has borderline Autism. For a person like me,who is sucked up in technology all the time, who has never heard a word like that, I really could not understand what that means but initially it sounded negative to me and without knowing what it really is, I cried all night, once again thinking why all bad things happen to me.

I did some research to find out what Autism means and looking at my 2 year old son , I did not believe that its true for him as he looked perfectly normal to me. I was only concerned about he not responding to me, when i used to call his name and that he has not started to talk.

Due to my father’s bad health, my wife had to stay with my parents, who lived thousands of miles away from me. My son had to be with her at that time. It was good as well as bad from my son’s perspective.

It was good because , my son was able to live with more number of people. In Bangalore, it was only me ,my wife and him. Being in an IT company, I was always occupied by my work. so effectively  it was my son and my wife alone , my presence was minimal. That is not many people. So I was happy that he will be with more number of people.

Bad thing was, Me and my wife were worried about the therapies that the doctors had suggested for my son as those were not available at my parents location.

Honestly, we still did not believe that our son had mild autism.  After living with my parents and family his eye contact got really better, still he had not started talking. My wife had already spent almost year and my son was almost 3 years when she returned home after my father recovered.

My son had better eye contact but still no speech. My wife started the recommended therapies at suggested schools, After few months when she still did not see any major break through , she started believing in astrologers and the rituals and prayers recommended by them and followed them and waited for few months while carrying on with therapies. Astrologer even provided a date after which my son will start peaking .Once that duration expired, I finally told my wife to stop believing in that stuff and lets get better therapies done for him, from better therapists.

We finally found good speech therapist and occupational therapist but they were at two different locations. My wife had to travel through bus to two different locations for these therapies.  She used to get tired and for me ,when I used to come back after office, I used to find her really tired and depressed at times. Such a sight is not very easy on eyes. Although ,She has started taking driving classes to make this easy but its her 24×7 devotion to my son.

I once visited the facility that provides occupational therapy, there was a note written on the board, which said, My child, I m your mom , i m your Gini. I will become everything you want  me to be. I will do everything for you, learn any thing, to make your life better. Reading those lines , I felt pain deep inside my heart. It was about a mother’s extreme love and devotion for her child.  And I could very well understand what it meant as I have  seen that in action every day. I felt deep gratitude for my wife as she had been Gini for my son. I felt gratitude for all the mothers including my mother as I was not any easy child either.

When your child grows up and still does not speak, he  can not convey what he wants and mostly becomes irritated and angry after we are not able to understand what he wants. This is easier said then experienced. Its really tough when you don’t have any social circle as well and your family and parents live far away. I had great friends in Bangalore, but with time most of them moved to different locations and I was all alone with my wife and my little son.

All this flashed into my mind when my friend ,who lost his newly born son and mentioned that all the bad things happened to him only. I shared my story with him and that he is not alone who was in pain. There were other friends who shared similar problems they were facing in their lives.

later after few days this caused me to think again, I felt just I shared my story with him and said he is not the only one in pain. Its true for me as well, then why I should say something like that,” why this happens to me only”. In fact this so called “this” happens to all of us.  This made me to think about life in a very different way.

Suddenly ,I saw my self as a very lucky man. when you think about the pain of others you realize that your pain is nothing compared to others , you ask god to help people who are in pain, But you also realize that your cribbing was really meaningless.  I realized that god and this world has given me so much to be thankful to them.

I realized that from my birth till today, god has been so great and kind to me. I felt gratitude to god for saving me in the car accident that happened few years back, in which I was badly injured and narrowly escaped death. He gave me such wonderful loving parents. Loving brother and sisters. Then such a wonderful loving wife and such a beautiful gift i.e. my son, He may not be speaking today but the same great god, who gave me everything i wanted, i have trust in him , that my son will speak like any other kid one day.

When I was thanking god for everything, I was wondering, shall i thank god for giving me such a amazing family and awesome friends or I should thank my friends and family separately. I would say , I thank all of them.  I never knew, it would be such a pleasure thanking all the people and god for everything. Writing this makes me happier then ever.

Really Grateful to God and this world, for everything I have.