Vacuum and Me

Here is the text of my Project 2 speech in the Storytelling Manual for my Advanced Communicator Bronze Award

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if we believe one event made the other one happen, we call them cause and effect. If we think one event is the response to the other, we call it a reaction. If we think someone deserved what happened, we call it retribution or reward. If we cannot find a reason for the two events’ occurring simultaneously or in close proximity, we call it an accident. If we cannot find a relation between incidents, we call it a coincidence.

Is everything that happens in this world connected? Do events create resonances like ripples across a net? Or do things merely co-occur and we give meaning to these co-occurrences based on our belief system?

Toastmaster of the day, Fellow Toastmasters and most welcome guests, I am not going to ask you whether you believe that there is a larger design behind what we call coincidences. That it is a word we use when we cant see the levers and pulleys of our lives.

I am going to let you decide for yourselves after you listen to my story.

It is very common these days that people live in many cities, not just within a country, but between different countries. But 35 years ago in India, it was a big deal that my father was working in a bank and we lived all over India, which as you know is a big country.

So it happens that in the year 1990, I was in Grade XII in Kolkata, on the eastern side of India. Let me say first of all, I was a good student, as in, I was well-behaved, conscientious and hard working. In all my 12 years of schooling, 6 years of college and 4 years of PhD, I got punished only once. And for what?

I challenged my English teacher, in front of my entire class, on the spelling of the word vacuum. The teacher said “vacuum” and I insisted it was “vaccum”. You never challenge a teacher on her turf. The consequences can be dangerous. I am a professor myself now. I know.

I didn’t know it then. I was what 18 years old? The teacher saved my face in front of my friends by asking me to check for the correct spelling. If her spelling turned out to be the correct one, I was to write it a 100 times. Needless to say, I ate the proverbial humble pie and submitted the “imposition” the next day.

Little did I know then that, that word vacuum was going to keep coming back to me all my life. A connection so remarkable that I have to agree with the world’s greatest physicist, Albert Einstein who has said that “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining Unknown Author”.

Thirteen years later in 2003, I met and married my husband in Mumbai on the western side of India. It was not an arranged marriage. But a love marriage. All women marry a guy she likes at the right age. I liked him because he was and still is a very handsome man – slim, tall, fair-skinned, gentle and well employed. I don’t know if we make a decision to marry a person on his job content. I didn’t. I only knew that he was a scientist working in India’s top nuclear research laboratory.

I learned eventually during our months of dating that he was among the top five scientists in the whole world who study vacuum and its nuclear and industrial applications.  He designs and creates vacuum-based instruments.  I asked him just this week when I was preparing for this speech about the probability of our coming together actually happening. He does the math better than me, you know. He said, “It is next to nothing.”  Our coming together was destiny, fate, co-incidence.

A year later, in 2004, we gave birth to our first child, our son. And How?

Those of you who have children, would know that gynaecologists classify the process of birthing a child into 5 types – vaginal birth, caesarean, vaginal birth after caesarean, forceps delivery and vacuum extraction. It’s a procedure where the gynaecologist applies a vacuum (a soft or rigid cup with a handle and a vacuum pump) to the baby’s head to help guide the baby out of the birth canal during the course of vaginal childbirth.  We had to do it because our son was a big baby at 4.5 kgs at birth and we did not want a caesarean birth.

I am not sure whether my husband was more happy about the birth of our son or about the application of his field of specialisation in the birth of his son. I can still remember him explaining the principle of vacuum to the gynaecologist even as she was pulling out our son and I was screaming in pain.

Twelve years later in February 2016, I had to undergo a surgery to remove a swelling in my chest bone that was so located between my lungs that the incision could not be stitched and had to be left to heal by itself. Even my bone had to be scraped a bit to remove the cyst. The incision was 5 inches deep and one inch wide; you could practically see the bone.  I felt pain in every letter of the word excruciating.

The only way my pain could be reduced was with a technique called vacuum-assisted (VAC) therapy which is a widely acknowledged method for chronic and traumatic wound healing. Basically, a mild vacuum suction was attached to my chest for a 5 full days.  It still took me 2 more months for the wound to close up.

The open wound looked so hideous and yet my husband used to dress the wound every day. During that period when I was most depressed, I thought that it was my husband who helped me heal in the form of vacuum.

Toastmasters, these are one too many vacuumic (that’s a word I created with no fear of imposition!) things happening in my life, I should say. Till this date, I don’t know the technical definition of vacuum. I just know vacuum is technically nothing. But it is everything. In my life.

Maybe it was for this reason that 25 years ago, my teacher ensured that I got vacuum right. For vacuum was going to be an integral part of my life.

It’s hard to believe in coincidence, but it’s even harder to believe in anything else. If there was no such thing as coincidence, there would be no such word. As the English Author G K Chesterton said, “Coincidences are spiritual puns”. When I reflect on my life so far, I cannot but agree with the spiritual thought leader Deepak Chopra, “When you live your life with an appreciation of coincidences and their meanings, you connect with the underlying field of infinite possibilities”.

I am clear on the matter of coincidences. What about you?

Over to you Toastmaster.