The Dogfight And The Lone Peacekeeper

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At work, Suyog Ketkar is a certified technical Acom communicator and mentor. At heart, he is a writer. In 2017, he published his first book, The Write Stride-A Conversation with Your Writing Self, in which he discusses communicating the correct message correctly. In the past, he has spoken at national conferences. Some of his works have been published in international magazines. You can find him his social media, on his website (http://suyogketkar.com), on his YouTube channel (Words and Wordsmith), and on Quora, where he has close to 400 answers.

It was a usual Sunday afternoon when I was sitting on a Idian on the ground floor. This is where my maternal grandmother (Aaji) used to spend a part of her day, either listening to Geet Ramayana, or for her little afternoon nap. The room smelt mostly of agnihotra or dhoopam (incense sticks). But that day, something was different. Something wasn't usual about it. When I am in my hometown, I never choose to go into that room for work. But that day, I decided to sit there because I felt it had the right ambience for me to contemplate and glean my thoughts. The setting was just right. But why? It had only been a week since she passed away. That day, looking at her picture, I realized that she was the kind of person whose presence might go unnoticed, but whose absence will indeed be registered.

In her (almost) nine decades of earthly life, I recall sharing only about twenty-five percent of it with her. Yet, she had filled nearly all of my childhood with her melodious lullabies and countless stories of ordinary people who became heroes in real life. Through the stories she told, she crafted the author in me long before I had realized it. Perhaps that is why she had tears of joy rolling down her cheeks when she held my first book, The Write Stride-A Conversation with Your Writing Self. She was also the first one, maybe the only one from that generation, to read it from cover to cover.

Was that the reason I had a heavy heart, yet I still could not pare it down to sentences? I mean, the light was sufficient, there was a pleasant aroma in the air, and the room had the right vibes for me to sit and contemplate. I wanted to write, but I could not help but think of her. I sat there, staring at the blinking cursor. For a long time, I struggled to reduce this gap between a mind full of thoughts and the blank page I was staring at.

**Contents and Sample Pages**