Remembering Geeta

...Her Calling

This was a touching tribute, written by an ex-student. It reached me as it circulated among others. In a special and deep way, he had captured what her work had meant for Geeta - her vocation... her calling...




It was during discussions like these, classroom sessions and personal growth labs that one felt the full impact of her clear thinking, sound logic and fertile imagination. She could germinate seeds of thought and learning in our minds easily, because she treated each one of us in a special, caring way and used the right amounts of fertilizer, water and sun for his/her growth...

...In the last term, Dr. G got quite unwell. The doctors diagnosed it as the cancer of the breast. She had to go twice a week for chemotherapy sessions. She started spending less time in institute work. She may have dreaded the pain during the therapy, but she never let it show. We were shocked and felt helpless to see her deteriorating health, right in front of our eyes. God alone knows how much the good lady must have been suffering when she tried to be her usual ebullient self. A shining example of one who believed in the doctrine ‘Never Say Die’ !

All this happened three years ago. Most of us are now successfully climbing the corporate ladder. It was while I was on an assignment in another country that a friend sent me the tragic news of her death. The news was not a shock, but it still came as a blow.

As I sit now, in the quiet solitude of my apartment, I think about her life. My eyes grow moist, less due to grief and more in awe and admiration for this remarkable soul who shed her light on all whom she crossed in her life. She may have been a professor in organizational behavior, but to many of us, she also taught about life.

I don't think that in her work, she only "taught about life" - she also learnt about it. I often felt that her interactions with students - while teaching, counselling, conducting labs - were also mirrors in which she could see her own past and present issues, could talk about them, and accept and come to terms with them...

Even during 96-97 - after her last tumour was detected, and she took leave from the institute - this discovering of self in others continued. It just makes sense now that many people she interacted, shared with, and helped during this period, were themselves cancer patients, or those who had someone in their family with cancer...

I found this poem in one of her old 1977 diaries. It was not her own - she had copied it down from, I believe, one of the issues of the Personal Guidance Journal. But it must have made some significant meaning for her to have copied it...In retrospect, it did personify an archetypal self, which Geeta was to unfold into...

I, Counsellor

I come with more questions than answers.
I come humbly,
with a vision of so many people (like you)
bound by fear - half dead and weary
I have come out of my own, wandering through fear.

Now I sit humble
before the pain and loss I see in your eyes
because the struggle I know will be a part of your seeking here
(what can I give you?
how can I touch you?)

I am here because I believe in the hour of our birth
that it exists within us still!
the promise,
the release,
the endless possibilities to be...
Only you have become a stranger to yourself
and no longer know this to be so.

I want to lead you closer to yourself,
to experience... and thus to know,
and in knowing, no longer fear.

We can go only as far as you are willing and I am able
(how far? how direct? how sure a way?)
There seem to be so many ways to get there,
to the source of you.
I have many questions
but, believe me, I care for you!

In caring for you, I am caring for me
and for those fragile, pulsating urges within...
for life.

Listen!
Shall we go
and perhaps, at the very best,
together,
we can stumble a bit closer.

****

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