Chennai: The mysterious disappearance of MH370 aircraft for people who lost their family along with it, is an ordeal and are trying to accept it. One such person is K S Narendran from Chennai, who lost his wife Chandrika with the Malaysian airline.
While this is one incident, another case is of veteran adman, rural marketing guru and author R V Rajan, who lost his wife Prabha due to cancer.
The common aspect that unites the two individuals is living a life after the passing away of their beloved ones. Vaani Anand and AVIS Viswanathan, ‘the happynesswalas’, as part of the happyness conversations, spoke to Narendran and Rajan about acceptance and being happy.
While Chandrika worked for a gambit of causes to make the world a better place to live, Prabha was an author which, Rajan, not only identified the talent, but also nurtured it.
“Being a graduate, I thought Prabha would socialise well. But during the very first party I took her to, I found that she was very poor in communicating in English. She was not the girl I dreamt of,” admitted Rajan and added that she was a good housewife.
For Narendran, his life took a turn when he realised his wife went missing. Describing it, he said, “In the initial years, the essential preoccupation was to somehow locate the missing plane. We are expected to presume that she is not going to come back and there is no certainty around it. With passage of time, I had to reconcile with the proposition.”
But Rajan’s was a different story. Life was all well until a day when Prabha decided to pen a letter to her husband. “Prabha was under pressure and was losing cool often. One night, I returned home late after work and I was surprised to a find a 10-page letter, pouring her heart out. I read the letter thrice and did not react. I realised that she was missing an emotional connect with me, she was drowned in identity crisis and the most important finding was the discovery of the writer in her.”
The next morning, Rajan got the letter published in a leading Tamil magazine and what began there did not pull Prabha down. Soon she began socialising and contributed short stories and articles to various vernacular publications. Prabha was diagnosed of cancer and passed away.
The difficult phase began when Narendran and Rajan had to cope up with life after knowing the reality. Rajan decided to celebrate her life by setting up Prabha Rajan Talent Foundation (PRTF) that promotes creative writing among women and aiding the educational needs.
Narendran said, “I realised that there was no point asking for answers which apparently are not available and I did not know where to look for them. I eventually decided to accept the reality as it was and move on.”
Narendran helped his daughter, Meghna accept the reality. “I realised I cannot be a substitute to a mother and I should not even try. But I made sure that there is no taboo subject between us and gave her the freedom to speak about everything.”
However, in reality, it is becoming common for people and suffer internally without expressing. ‘People think they are vulnerable. But being so is not a weakness and we need to realise that there are fellow humans to come out and help when it is needed,’ Vaani said.