MY MEMOIRS - Jayaraj Menon

Retirement from service changed the course of my life. The daily routine that I had religiously followed for over three decades had come to a stop, and I was not prepared to fritter away my time by merely sitting at home without any engagement. So, I had devised a slew of plans to deal with the situation much before my retirement. One of the plans was to travel around the country and explore its beauty and diversity. Close on the heels of my retirement, Suma also made up her mind to quit her job by opting to take voluntary retirement. So, everything was perfectly in place for us to execute our plans one by one. But it was not to be. All of our well-thought-out schemes were thrown into disarray by a dreaded virus called Covid-19 that invaded the whole world and held people to ransom. The virus spread thick and fast, forcing people to confine themselves indoors. Every human activity on the face of the earth came to a standstill. Our tour plans were no exception. The tour operators with whom we had a couple of tours scheduled shut shop. The airlines stopped their operations. The invisible virus had clipped everyone’s wings in a very sadistic manner. After a few days, life at home became unendurable and extremely suffocating. When every alternative idea to break free from the crisis situation came unstuck, an idea crossed my mind, and it was something that I had never done before. It was about writing a vignette about the memories of my life. I knew it was uncharted territory for me, and the exercise demanded exacting standards that I hardly possessed. Nevertheless, I decided to go ahead with the idea. Since penning my biography was a tad premature, I decided to focus on the period from my childhood extending up to my retirement from service. It was never a cake walk for me as I had to cut through layers of adversities to complete the book. The efforts have since come to fruition and most humbly I present the book "My Memoirs" before you. This is an amateurish attempt and should be viewed in that light only. As I do not have any literary background worth boasting about or the aptitude to make the narration free-flowing, readers might find the book occasionally dragging and mundane. To keep the readers' misery to a minimum, I have only delved into incidents and memories that have either influenced me to a great extent or continued to linger in my mind unremittingly. Jayaraj Menon