The magic hand at work

Chetana Vaishnavi

A renowned eye surgeon showed a video clip of his operative skills to the audience during a conference abroad and everybody applauded. Struck with awe, the chairperson remarked, ‘There is magic in his hands!’  We too looked at the clip with utter surprise. So much skill in the hands of a man to serve mankind! It was unbelievable!

My daughter was surprised when her friend told her one day, ‘What do you think? All these inventions and discoveries, do you think they are made by man? No, they are the work of God.  He comes down to Earth and makes people do all these for the service of mankind!’

When I had shifted from a primary to a secondary school in Class VIII in Mumbai, my drawing teacher was not happy with my work and would scold me. As I was good in most other subjects and my poetic ability was recognised by my teachers, I might have been a topic for discussion in the staff room. One day, the drawing teacher met me in the corridor and asked disbelievingly, ‘Are you constructing poems?’  Though I felt uncomfortable with the word ‘constructing’, I replied in the affirmative. After that, he held me in awe, because during those times there were very few poets around. He even stopped chiding me for my poor drawings and helped me do better. But ‘constructing’ haunts me till this day. All that I wrote as a child and then as a young adult, flowed out of my pen, which holds good even to this day, except for the ones which I sat down and ‘constructed’. Yes, God works through us, his mankind, in different ways!

Every time I look at a plane flying, a submarine, a train and now various kinds of technologies flooding us, I wonder how a small collection of neurons could think so mighty! Definitely it is the work of God, which we claim as ours!

God’s presence around us cannot be more obvious when last year our cab, which was running at great speed (despite our several requests to the driver), met with a serious accident in the middle of the night. I along with my husband and daughter were travelling from Delhi to Chandigarh, when the cab crashed with a truck at a crossroads and I announced instantly that we were all dead!  But the magic hand did not want us to die then. We do not know who called the police and the ambulance. We were tucked into the ambulance and rushed to the Civil Hospital. The Samaritans who brought us to the hospital stayed with us for more than two hours, and disappeared only after they saw us off in another ambulance that brought us to the PGI.

The magic hand worked for us through strangers!