When the World Turned Upside Down
My dad believed in my dream. He was the only one who did. My wife, family, friends—they all thought, sometimes openly, that I was crazy. Buying land for a farm, with all its risks, when we could have bought a flat or a plot in Bangalore? It seemed impractical, even ridiculous. But Dad? He stood by me. He believed in the idea of building something natural, something real. He was the one who fought to make it happen.
I’d always heard that time slows down in moments of crisis. That when you’re standing at the edge, staring down the possible loss of something—or someone—you love, time moves differently. But I never truly believed it until that early morning in 2021. The morning we were told my dad’s heart wasn’t working the way it should. That he needed surgery. Urgently.
You think you know fear. You think you’ve felt its weight before. But nothing prepares you for that moment when the world starts slipping out of your grasp, and you realize just how fragile everything is. My dad, who had always been the strongest person I knew, was lying there, and all I could think was—what if? What if the surgery didn’t work? What if I never got to tell him how much I appreciated everything he’d done?
Have you ever looked at someone you love and realized just how much of your life is wrapped around them? How every decision, every memory, every piece of your future feels tied to their presence? That’s what it felt like. My dad wasn’t just a man with a weak heart. He was the foundation of everything I believed in. And now, that foundation was shaking.
A count of 150,000 is considered medically low. My dad's count at the time was some 6,000.
The doctors didn’t sugarcoat it. He needed urgent surgery—a minimally invasive angioplasty. But to perform it, they needed to make a small cut. You’d think the worst moment would be hearing the words “heart attack,” but it wasn’t. It was what the doctors said next: his blood wasn’t clotting properly after a recent bout of COVID. That small cut they needed to make for the life-saving surgery could itself become life-threatening if the bleeding didn’t stop. They needed a week to improve his clotting ability, but he only had hours without the surgery. We were living the definition of fear, understanding the magnitude of the problem. Watching doctors fight against time to save a loved one is a helplessness you never forget.
Image of a random angiogram. Image credit: www.jethrojeff.com
Medical science, technology, and the sheer competence of doctors today are astounding. They managed to perform a life-saving surgery to open one of the multiple blocks in his heart in record time, minimizing blood loss. Their plan was to perform another angioplasty in the following weeks after treating his low platelet count. It took three months, a lot of extended family support, and immense resilience to see him recover. My dad was just 63 at the time.
It was an immensely stressful time for our family, especially for me when I was still in the UK when this all started
In the UK, I was grappling with worry as all this unfolded in India. I could sense the anxiety in my mom’s voice and the cluelessness of my relatives when I asked about Dad. When I finally arrived in India and stepped into the hospital, amidst all the chaos, I found something remarkable—my dad’s steady belief. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t panic. Instead, he told me, “Let’s go ahead with scouting for the land as soon as it’s practical. Let’s do it and get the land.”
Can you imagine that? In the middle of life and death, with doctors discussing his next critical steps, he was thinking about the farm. Our farm. The one we hadn’t even purchased yet. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand the gravity of his situation. He simply refused to let it define him. He believed in something bigger—our shared dream of building a natural space, working the land, and creating something that would outlast us. I didn’t realize it then, but his unwavering belief carried me through. How could I falter when he stood strong, even when his own heart wasn’t?
We got through all the rounds of platelet infusions and surgeries. But we didn’t come out the same. I didn’t come out the same. Everything felt more fragile, more urgent. And I knew, more than ever, that this dream—this land—wasn’t just a project. It was our legacy. Something to hold onto when everything else felt uncertain. They say every sunrise brings hope. But you don’t really understand that until you’ve spent enough time in the dark, waiting. And when the light finally comes, you don’t just see it—you feel it. Every ray, every color, every impossible moment of it. And you tell yourself you’ll never take another sunrise for granted again.
It was by then new year 2022. In the next post I'll share our experience of looking for land in Karnataka - what worked for us and what did not.
Until then.