I admit I am biased. I prefer poets to politicians,  photographers to pilots, professors to promoters, actors to accountants, comedians to company lobbyists, band leaders to brokers, writers to realtors – and singers to soldiers.
 
I have met some military bigwigs I did not care for. I did not care for their assumption that because they sported a bunch of colors on their chest, they had profound insights into society or politics. On the other hand, my work has thrown me in close contact with ordinary soldiers, airmen or marines whose sincerity and simplicity have charmed me.
 
In both rich and poor countries, I have seen that the vast number of service people come from modest families. Affluent families send their children to fancy colleges and expensive universities. They would like their children to work in banks, insurance companies, investment firms and corporate headquarters. It is the poor and middleclass families whose sons and daughters look desperately for jobs in factories, workshops, retail stores and delivery companies. They join the military in large numbers.

That is how Orville joined the marine corps. And that is how I met him, an Indiana farm boy, in a Central American country.
 
He was a part of the marine guard in our embassy. His uniform and his manner spoke of a person out to do his duty well. But his young face and earnest voice spoke of a simple, inexperienced lad from the countryside.
 
I found an opportunity to speak to him and learned of the tiny town where he grew up. His father and two uncles were farmers; none had attended college, nor had his mother. But Orville liked to read and wanted to go to college. And see the world. How does a farmboy get that kind of an ambition?
 
Orville extracted from his hip a small well-thumbed pocketbook of Dr Seuss’s poetry, ‘Oh, the Places You'll Go!’ I read: 
 
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
 
The direction he chose was this place in Central America. He was carrying a Spanish phrasebook and tried bashfully to exchange a few sentences with me. He said he was enrolled in some online courses toward a degree.
 
Every time I met him afterward he tried a few more Spanish words on me. He was looking for more exciting opportunities and, when he tried to translate ‘moving mountains’ I remembered Seuss’s couplet,
 
Your mountain is waiting,
So... get on your way!
 
I returned to Washington and had a card from Orville, on his first deployment to Afghanistan. He was happy and excited, though he reported how baffled and anxious were his relatives in Merom, Indiana.
 
When he returned from his second deployment, he called and narrated his experiences, both harrowing and thrilling. I remembered his gentle face and advised him to be careful in all circumstances. He assured me he was in a very good team that would protect him.
 
He sent out a card to his friends just before leaving on his third tour. It spoke touchingly of his parents and younger brother and the fun he had with his uncles and their children. He was going again to serve his country and he wrote, “There are games to be won.” I recalled that was a quotation from his favorite author, Dr Seuss.
 
That was his last deployment. A roadside explosive device blew up in his face in the Helmand province when he bent down to examine something suspicious he saw. Dr Seuss had warned:
 
Things may happen and often do
to people as brainy and footsy as you.
 
His family went to the Seattle airport when his body was flown in, though they were advised not to see it. They would have liked him interred in Merom next to his grandfather where they could easily visit his graveside, but they knew Orville preferred to be buried in Arlington Cemetery near Washington along with his comrades in arms.
 
So it was on a bright summer afternoon, on Memorial Day, I went to Arlington and met Orville’s father, mother, brother and two uncles. We sat on the grass next to Orville’s cenotaph and shared memories. Happy memories, comic memories, proud memories, memories that made a young man come alive again.  
 
I thought of the eager youthful face longing for adventure, as Orville’s uncle handed me a cup of coffee. As I sipped, I read the last bit of Orville’s epitaph from his headstone, inscribed with words from his beloved book:
 
Ready for anything under the sky.
Ready because you're that kind of a guy!
 
Wars have been fought and will be fought again. Historians will speak of win and loss. But for Orville’s loving family and the people like me who cared for him, there will be only an irredeemable loss.

​500 miles separate me from my daughters.
 
I live in Washington, on the east coast; they live in Charleston, in the US deep south. I have a house there too, but it seems a stretch to think of it as home, so rarely I am there. No longer I enjoy driving the distance at one go, and so going there entails planning ahead and using a hotel as a midway stop.
 
The bigger reason for my rare trips is that I have become accustomed to my home and my town. It is a pleasant enough house, larger than my needs. I rarely use the ground floor and am content using only the kitchen, one of the bathrooms and the large bedroom I have made my study. A smaller bedroom I use only to sleep, and the deck outside is my favorite haunt, to read and to daydream.
 
Even the city, Washington, though I live on its fringe, has its fascination for me. It is a busy city, always vibrant, resonant with memories of the places where I have lived, worked, eaten, met with friends, watched plays, heard concerts. Its streets evoke memories, its hotels have histories for me, its old buildings fascinate me. Its free museums are an eternal charm, its think tanks with their talks are an enticing draw.
 
Yet my daughters are there. At 500 miles. When I see them my heart takes a leap.

​My life is peaceful. My work was just the opposite. I started with business but in a sizable corporation. Life wasn’t topsy-turvy from day to day, my livelihood did not depend on a weekly revenue. Yet clashes and conflicts were a daily occurrence. The uncertainties of life are one thing, but quite another were the personal fights, turf wars and departmental skirmishes. When I went to work for an international organization, these clashes were compounded by ethnic biases and national discords. These came into the open when I started my diplomatic career. Little prejudices and large assumptions lay behind the gloss and glitter. It amazed me that big people seemed to have such small minds. Large issues remained unresolved because of petty antagonisms.
 
Now I live a more tranquil life. It is largely a life of quiet study, sustained exploration and a peaceful probe of troubling matters. I am happy in my home, relaxed in my fitful interviews and at home when I travel to unfamiliar shores. But it is all by myself. If I am happy, there is scantly anyone to share my happiness with.
 
My daughters are 500 miles away. In another world.
 
Of course, I love to see them. I take breaks from whatever I do and spend a few days with them. I would have preferred them to be a little nearer; I could visit them more often. The distance is a bit more than I care to drive in a day, and the pandemic makes it harder. I am forced to stay overnight in a hotel, where it is hard to avoid other people in a hall or maintain social distance.
 
For months I have not seen my daughters. I speak to them on the phone, even see them periodically on my computer. I miss feeling close to them. I miss holding their hands or hugging them. They tell me of the improvements they have made in their homes. They have bought shiny new cars. I haven’t seen any of those. It frustrates me, even when they send me photographs or try to show me on the phone. I am old-fashioned enough to want to see it all directly, standing next to my daughters, and be able to tell them what I think of them. I want to be able to share, in my limited way, their life with me. I want to feel a part of their fast-changing life.
 
But they live 500 miles away. A huge expanse of space between us.
 
No longer. Last week I took an impulsive decision. The decision to take a risk and drive the 500 miles and visit them. A Hilton hotel offered to give me a sanitized room, exempt from all service staff.  I stayed there a cautious night and drove through the southern countryside to Charleston.
 
As I came closer, each hour I reminded myself I was an hour nearer to my daughters. The drive felt easy, the traffic insignificant. I drove at a steady pace, resisting the lure of the rest stop cafés on the way, and finally entered Charleston.
 
For my convenience, they are both waiting in my Charleston home. They have brought food, plenty of it. They have chilled the wine. They have placed the covers and cutlery on the large dining table. But first I must hug them and kiss them and peer at their beautiful faces. They are smiling and my heart is bursting. What did I do to deserve such loving, charming children!
 
But, wait, what else have they placed on the table? A big tray with a large, luscious birthday cake. They remembered it was my birthday! I invite my daughter’s tousle-haired little girl, just three, to come and help me dice the cake. Excited, laughing, she comes and places her soft little hand on mine and steadies the knife as it enters the almond-chocolate cake.
 
All the 500 miles have simply melted away, like the butter and sugar in my birthday cake.

​When Ted and Viviane moved in as neighbors, they brought along their new baby, barely a week old. I looked at the baby, Nyla, and felt nostalgic. My baby, now eighteen, was in college, hundreds of miles away.
 
I would see Viviane every other day, her long hair in a braid and a small teddy in her hand, going on a walk with Nyla in a stroller. Sometimes she would stop to say hello and move on. In a while, I saw Nyla sitting up in the stroller and looking at everything, including me, with large, limpid eyes. Then one day Viviane came out without the stroller, with Nyla holding on to her hand and tottering forward, step by slow step.
 
There was no stopping the baby after that. I visited her parents for a cup of tea and saw the baby endlessly rushing from room to room. Occasionally falling, getting up and again lurching to her next destination. She had discovered the strength of her little legs and the joy of moving them, and nothing would inhibit her explorations.

Finally came the day when Nyla could walk by herself on the sidewalk bordering our homes. You had to see to believe how fast she moved, as if to make up for her pintsize limbs. Along with her parents, I watched in amazement as she ambled, virtually ran, the entire length of the sidewalk.
 
Thus began my special relationship with Nyla. On a weekend, I had just put down my first cup of coffee and opened the voluminous Sunday paper, when I heard a soft noise on my front door. There was Nyla, too small to be able to reach the calling bell, banging her little fist on my door. Viviane stood nearby, looking a little abashed, and explained apologetically, “Nyla wanted to see you.”
 
I opened the door and Nyla toddled right in, followed by Vivian. Nyla came to see what I was doing on the computer and then went to the living room and closely examined the large white teddy bear astride a chair, a memento left by my baby. She caressed it, smiled and, with what seemed like a nod of approval, went out with her mother.
 
After that, our relationship grew. Nyla went out regularly for a walk with her mother, sometimes accompanied by her father too, and periodically strayed to my home to meet her two friends, me and the teddy bear.
 
Over the years, Nyla grew into a pretty little girl, exploring the streets near our homes, playing in the park near our home with other children or in the park farther away where there were tempting slides. She learned to hop, skip and jump on the sidewalk, the squares marked in chalk in her progressively steady but still uncertain hand. She kept visiting me too, now by herself, flaunting her independence. If I was working on the laptop, she would sit on my lap and watch the letters appear in sequence. When she left, I would plant a kiss on her chubby cheeks and place a Lindor chocolate in her hand.
 
Ted and Vivian home-schooled her for several years. When she started going to a neighborhood school, I would see her run to the yellow school bus with a large backpack. I signaled to her from my doorstep and was rewarded with a huge wave and large smile. I began to see less and less of her, doubtless because she started spending more and more time with new friends. I saw even less of her when she graduated to high school, for she began to swim competitively and volunteer as a lifeguard.
 
This was nothing new, for I remembered how strange it seemed when my daughter went to college. Something seemed to be missing in my life when I would come back from work in the evening and the home seemed unnaturally quiet.
 
However, Nyla was always warm and scrupulously pleasant when we met, and I loved the limited time we had together. She would tell me of her friends, the ones who were cordial and the ones who were unaccountably catty. She told me of her new activities, the school play she was acting in and music lessons she was taking.
 
I told her that I was going abroad on an assignment for seven months but would return just in time for her birthday. I would love to take her out for dinner.
 
When you return to the country after a long stretch, there are always many chores to attend to, but I remembered my commitment to Nyla. I made a reservation at a French restaurant and told her. She said she had a tea party in the afternoon with some friends for her birthday and would meet me at the restaurant.
 
I was waiting at a table when Nyla walked in. I almost didn’t recognize her for a few seconds. She was wearing a floral tie-front maxi and her hair looked stylishly piled. High heels contributed to a more adult look. I said, “Nyla, happy birthday! You look splendid.”
 
But it was much more than the look. She had grown up. She wasn’t the little girl who would casually hop into my lap. She looked charming and she acted charming in every way, but she was now different. She now talked in a different, maturer way; she even said my name differently. No doubt, she had grown up.
 
I recalled the day my daughter returned from college. I loved her as ever, but she was different and grown-up. She was set to take a job, to start her own home and begin a new and separate life. Good luck to her, but on my desk was still her school graduation photo.
 
They all grow up. I almost wish they didn’t.
 

​Mr. Blanchard might be the happiest blind man alive. He is certainly the happiest man I know.
 
He is in his late eighties, I estimate. He sits ramrod straight. He walks with a cane but is still erect. A white-haired man who projects an air of self-assurance. He is always well shaved and nattily dressed, as if he is going for a date. Once, when I tell him this, he laughs and says, “Indeed I have a date. I have a date with the world.”
 
For me, he is a surprise. And I have told him why.

​When I was a young boy in Kolkata, I used to see every morning a youth guiding an old man across the street and seating him on the curb near a market corner. Next to him was placed a metal bowl where passers-by dropped a coin or two. The old man would sit there until dusk, hoping for alms, and occasionally muttering a plea for pedestrians. I couldn’t hear him, but I knew it was an abject plea, asking for pity and help from people who passed. Most ignored him, treating him as an easily disregarded apparition, but a few gave him small change. That was my first experience with a blind person.
 
When I grew up and went to work in a large factory, I met a blind man who worked close to me in the cycle tire shop. At the start of the shift, a young woman would bring him to the factory workplace and seat him down next to the machine where he worked and hand him the small packet that contained his lunch. It was considered very progressive of the company to have hired a blind man and made a minor adjustment to the supply line so that he could work there safely. I got to speak with him and he told me he had lost his eyes in an accident in the small car repair shop he had worked earlier without protective goggles. He felt grateful that the tire factory had hired him and paid him a decent wage. He was neatly dressed, very polite, agreeable to talk to, and fully reconciled to his present life. I found him a decent man but at the back of my mind was a murmur of discomfort. An educated man, doing a humdrum, repetitive job for seven years and set to do it seven years more perhaps, solely to earn a living. It seemed less than ideal. He might have been content, but I could not imagine him happy.
 
Mr. Blanchard, whom I met in my Washington apartment building, is a stunning contrast. He is neither pitiable nor content. He is a vibrant man, seemingly set to live a significant and happy life. I met him when my life was a bit of a mess; to talk to him, I felt, was a lesson in how to live such a radiant life.
 
As a young person, he had joined a public relations firm and worked in its advertising group as a copywriter. His interest changed over time and he started doing the graphic work for the copies. He ended up as the principal graphic artist of the company. He was a successful executive for nearly two decades when he started having problems with his sight. He experienced no pain or irritation in his eyes but found his vision begin to dim after a few hours of work.
 
First two eye doctors and then a famous specialist. The specialist read the reports, examined him for a long time and then, gently but firmly, dropped the hammer.
 
“I was to lose my sight,” explains Mr. Blanchard. “Something to do with my nerves. There was no remedy. I had four months, at most six, of quickly declining vision. Nothing after that.
 
“It was like a thunderclap. I could only think of my future days with anxiety and fear. I could not think straight. It was a week of sheer agony. Perhaps it was that which brought a slow measure of clarity. I was to lose vision, not my life. I did not want to forfeit my whole life because I couldn’t see any more.
 
“I set myself to learn braille. I took others’ advice and filled my home with equipment that helps sightless people, speakers and scanners and sound recorders. I bought a more powerful computer and added the right software. I subscribed to audio programs and records.
 
“I also joined a group, of people who had lost vision fairly recently. I heard their stories and drew support from their survival stories. Hearing them, I had the idea of going back to copywriting. I had the advantage that I could visualize the graphics and provide sketches of the design that could go with the copy. I created a new part-time career.
 
Mr. Blanchard laughs and adds, “It was the last thing I did that turned out to be the most sustaining. If I had only a few more months to see, I wanted to see the most – the things I most cared for and with the most care. I got up early to see the sun rise; I watched the sunset the way I had never done before. The park in the corner I reconnoitered as if it was to disappear the next day. Of my apartment I looked at every nook and cranny. My son and his children, every friend, I peered at their faces as if my life depended on it.”
 
He laughs again, “Indeed my life now relies on the most wonderful set of memories. I can clearly see the things I loved and wanted to see. I took the trouble to hold on to the sights and sounds and memories that others let go by. Perhaps a tad too carelessly.”
 
I look at his gentle, smiling face, and sit wondering. Then I hear these astounding words, “You think I don’t have a picture of you. I have met you recently, but we have spoken from the heart. And, my friend, I have a most beautiful picture of you.”

​I never wanted to be Superman.
 
I did not grow up with Superman comics. My first encounter with Superman was as an adult. I saw him in a movie. Yes, he could do strange things, lift a huge bus or fly like a bullet. That did not appeal to me: I was content to simply ride a bus or take a plane to go somewhere. Sacrilegious as it may sound, my affinity was with his other self, Clark Kent, the quiet, diffident newsman who pined for Lois Lane but couldn’t dare to take her in his arms. The Lois Lanes in my life didn’t even know I pined for them.

​For more than a year, we have been battered by a disease that honors no frontier and brooks no relief. A supercilious army of medical specialists, who had so far inculcated our false faith of invulnerability, have been brought to their knees. By a malady that has slaughtered over 4 million and haunts the 180 million that have recovered with undiagnosed ills. Businesses have collapsed, families are ruined, people rendered paupers, economies laid to waste. The world certainly needed a Superman to save it.
 
In this catastrophe has finally arisen the hope of a remedy, the miracle of a protective shield. A vaccine that can save you from the menacing virus. You will not have the disease; if you have it, you will be spared its worst depredation. All you must do is extend your arm, receive a mild jab or two and you are saved.
 
My friend Tanya, who volunteers at a center where the drug is administered and had herself received two doses of the vaccine, said, “You feel like a Superman. One moment you are weak and vulnerable, the next instant you are indestructible. You can go anywhere, meet anyone, do anything.”
 
On a frosty winter morning, I drove twenty miles to a large hospital complex and marched into a large building ironically titled the Sports Health Center. In a vast hall, a few hundred people were greeted by red-shirted volunteers and quickly shepherded to small, numbered tables. I went to a corner table, where presided a woman in her forties, in a turquoise blouse and a gray skirt. A pale blue mask covered the lower half of her face, but her eyes twinkled as she gestured me to sit close to her in a half-turned chair.
 
She said her name was Ann and asked me to introduce myself. I gave her my name and confirmed the particulars I had sent in earlier. Then I took off my jacket and rolled up my sleeve. The cleaning, injection and taping took hardly five minutes. Then Ann requested me to sit and rest for ten minutes, to make sure that I did not have a strong reaction. I didn’t, and in five minutes I was again in my car, on my way home.
 
I was now a Superman. I could now choke a little eating a bagel and cough, and people would not scatter for fear of catching a virus. I could now pass by the woods near my home and sneeze a little, and others around me would not run for life, fearing I was a potent Covid threat. I was now special, pretty close to royalty.
 
Royalty, as Meghan Markle has now abundantly shown, has its downside. I realize with shame that I have become special because I live in the US, one of the richer forty countries, mostly in Europe, that have stockpiled the vaccine and will probably overcome it by the year-end. Another 150 less affluent countries will take another year, if ever. As the New York Times says, a person of 70 can’t have the vaccine in Shanghai, nor one of 80 in Kenya or one of 90 in South Korea. A person of whatever age can’t have it in Haiti or Papua New Guinea – or in 67 countries of Africa.
 
Even where it is available, wildly diverse groups are entitled to the vaccine: a legislator in Lebanon, but not a pregnant woman in Germany; a prisoner in Florida and a smoker in Illinois, but not a smoker in Georgia or a prisoner in Texas, nor a diabetic in Connecticut or an immigrant in Arizona. In India, the vaccine is shamelessly given to the well-off who can register on a smartphone and can pay a decent fee.
 
This is monstrously parochial and insane, for we well know that the virus does not honor state or country borders. Our distribution of a royal privilege adheres more to our idea of who deserves to be selectively indulged and saved, though we also know that we have no safety unless we are all safe.
 
I feel a special kinship with Superman, for he was born the same year as me. Legend has it that he was born on another planet, Krypton, but he was really born in the US town of Smallville when writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster imagined him for DC Comics. He was possessed of incredible strength and a sense of mission – to rid the world of villains.
 
While I never wanted to be Superman, perhaps now, in a world ravaged by a mysterious scourge, I will have the strength of invulnerability. As for the villains, of whom there seem to be many (some at the very helm of my motherland) -- like Lex Luthor, either a greedy businessman or an unscrupulous technologist, or even a power-seeking, Machiavellian politico – perhaps I should raise my voice and see what I can do.