The family gathered to make Durai Uncle's 90th birthday celebrations heart-warming and memorable
Durai Uncle’s 90th birthday celebration went off beautifully by God’s grace. In fact, God’s grace was a recurring theme in the celebrations both in the message at church and in Durai Uncle’s personal testimony. The speaker in church spoke of “By the grace of God, I am what I am“, and quoted from the story of Moses to draw parallels to Uncle’s life. He referred to “Jehovah Rapha”, the Lord our Healer, “Jehovah Nissi”, the Lord our Banner (our standard, our protector) and “Jehovah Mkaddesh”, the Lord our sanctifier (the Lord rewards those who separate themselves unto him by worshipping him with their very lives).
As God has been with Durai Uncle all through his life, in times of crisis and challenge and in times of peace and happiness, the sermon was very apt.
The Thanksgiving service in the morning at Egmore Wesley Church was very beautiful and moving. The hymns all praised and thanked God and Nisha beautifully rendered the lofty notes of “To God be the glory” as a solo. Another older gentleman sang “Hallelujah Amen” to the tune of the song we had just sung as a congregation “To God be the glory, great things he hath done” and invited us to sing along. He said God has placed a song in everyone’s heart.
Rosh, Preetam, Nisha and Nikhil have done a marvellous job of all the arrangements and we followed a thanksgiving service order created for the occasion with Durai Uncle’s face on the cover. There was a beautiful intercessory prayer composed and read by Roshini which thanked God for all the wonderful gifts he has blessed Durai Uncle with and seeking His continued guidance and protection in the years ahead.
After the service, Durai Uncle cut a cake and we had a lovely breakfast outside the church. People wished Durai Uncle and met and greeted each other.
Durai Uncle didn’t want any mention of his achievements at church but with permission from Roshini I sneaked in the Durai Amazing Facts Quiz (with the answers) on a noticeboard by the cake table. People in the church at Chennai ddidn’t know about Durai Uncle’s life up north and were fascinated by the things he has done, they kept asking him ” You did that?” and I am told they even asked Rosh for xeroxes of the quiz!
Scrapbook Cover
Scrapbook inner cover
Sample page
Back cover (from the glog - that's a graphic blog, a poster on Durai Uncle's life).
I had brought a scrapbook of this 90th birthday blog (the one you’re reading now) which we passed around. The scrapbook was Rachna’s idea, as she said many people would not go to the internet and see all the greetings and shared memories that people had placed on the blog. (She was right – I don’t know how many people from our own family have seen the blog! Nisha saw it only a couple of days before the occasion. Click here to see the full-size glog (poster) shown above on the back cover of the scrapbook. You can zoom in to the pictures up close.)
As usual, before people ran away after the church service, we had to grab them and squeeze in a practice for the skit and the song which we were to perform in the evening. Vas akka and Angela helped me in organizing an on-the-spot-cast and with streamlining the “who is to do what” process and we managed just one practice of the skit and the song. Somehow in the evening it all came together and we presented “A trip to Fanisthan with the Durai Fan Club“. Jeyanthi and team in Bangalore had made fantastic looking fans of handmade paper hand-lettered with all the qualities of Durai Uncle which made people his fans.
In the evening we came to the Imperial Court at the Hotel Royal Plaza at Koyanbedu, very close to Durai Uncle’s house, for the birthday dinner. As we entered we were given favours with “90” on them, made by Nisha and Rosh. The table was set with “made for the occasion” autograph books made by Preeth, she had cut paper strips into long leaves on which we could write about Durai Uncle. She also colour-coded them by the generations – blue for the 4th generation (which includes babies – so she even managed to get a cute little footprint autograph from Anik’s baby before leaving Bangalore!) There were yellow pages for the third generation and so on. You get the picture. Preeth also “fanned out” these paper strips and placed them on the table so that it went with the theme of the Durai Fan Club (more on that later).
The hall was beautifully arranged with seating at tables facing the stage, and posters on the walls showing the highlights of Durai Uncle’s life and describing Durai Uncle’s achievements and also showing some interesting and historical shots of his family – from Burma days to the present. These photo blowups were pasted on handmade paper by Rosh and Nisha and put up all around the hall so people were interestedly looking at them and also taking pix of pix! There were about 90 people present which made it a warm, personal family get-together – very memorable! The nice thing was that Durai Uncle’s sisters’ children all came and attended the function too – in fact some of them stayed with Durai Uncle and others were put up in a hotel with other guests.
Nisha was the MC for the evening and after a Bible reading and opening prayer by Kumar, (Rajkumar David Mony) Durai Uncle’s nephew, the entertainment began with an interactive quiz – Vas akka’s brainchild. She distributed papers and said “This is a speed test, hurry, hurry, hurry – finish all the questions fast! ” Naturally everyone was trying to finish as many questions as possible – at the end she says, “Now that you’ve gone through all the questions, just answer questions 2,4,6,8!” So everyone had a good laugh and she read out the answers straight away.
Pradeep played the guitar and we sang the 90th birthday song to the tune of “Beautiful Sunday”. The audience was also given song sheets so they could sing along or follow the words. Durai Uncle’s side of the family also presented a song.
About the skit: Angela took us on “A Trip to Fanisthan with the Durai Fan Club.” She was the announcer and said there was a tornado sweeping through the city transforming Chennai into Fanisthan . Hordes of fans had descended on Chennai because of Durai’s 90th birthday celebrations. On this cue all the fans came rushing on to the stage.Three reporters did a spot poll to find out the reasons for Durai’s overwhelming popularity. As they asked asked “Why do you admire Durai so much?” each “Durai fan” held up one fan and spoke about that quality of Durai Uncle – eg Courage, Infectious Laugh, Man of Action, Terrific Tenor, Champ, Engineering Genius, — concluding with the fact that all his achievements were possible only because of his Deep Faith.
At the end of the skit, Nesan and Nikhil presented a bouquet and escorted Durai Uncle on the stage for the fans to honour him in person. We did a sort of a Fan Dance for him (very little practice so you can imagine what it looked like!) Then we presented the fans to him and laid them at his feet – like the Naga chiefs laid their gifts of a Naga spear, Naga knife, chicken and eggs at his feet. We bowed and walked backwards without turning our backs to him (just like the Naga chiefs did) to show respect. After this, Durai Uncle was shown off in style in the “custom-engineered Durai Mobile” – Nesan and Niikhil rotating umbrellas were the “wheels” of the carriage! And he went off in a shower of confetti from the “confetti guns” they nowadays use at weddings and celebrations. Like a gun salute!
Nikhil did a terrific dance – real filmi style with a cap he threw off and then danced with a lot of verve and gusto. He got a lot of applause.
Durai Uncle gave us an inspiring testimony about “the hand of God” intervening time and again in his life. He spoke of World War II when the Japanese bombed Rangoon and bombs fell just 50 feet from the air raid shelter where he and his engineers took refuge. He walked from Burma to India over 21 days on boiled rice and salt, with people dying like flies around him because of typhoid, cholera, elephantiasis, malaria and starvation. The wonderful thing was that he did not fall sick for a single day. This was truly the hand of God working in his life.
At the Hindustan Housing Factory, the 2,500 workers were from the Gujjar community with criminal backgrounds and he had to discipline them strictly but fairly. However some of the leaders ganged up against him and after beating up the security guards, they set out to harm him. Durai Uncle says he and his officers were in a room just one floor above and they could have easily done mischief. But they decided to go and first set fire to his car – this caused the AC duct to spew out smoke so they could not see anything and so could not come up the stairs. Durai Uncle and his officers were almost suffocating because of the smoke but the police came from the back and checked an escape door, found them inside and saved them just in time. In another 5 minutes they would have died because of suffocation. But Durai Uncle didn’t go home after that, he wrote 100 FIRs and chased the ringleaders and brought them to book by 1 am that night.
In Delhi, he took on the impossible task of building Pragati Maidan in
9 months. Other engineers had said it would take three years but Indira Gandhi wanted it launched during the silver jubilee year of India’s independence. He studied the international-standard specifications and prayed about taking on the task, and with the inspiration he got from God, within three days he drafted a plan of action to achieve this task in the specified time. He needed 35,000 workers, a number of architects and engineers, men, material, money – The govt sanctioned this and they worked 24 hours a day to achieve the spectacular result – in 9 months.
Duai Uncle’s black hair turned completely grey by the end of this project. He used to eat lunch at 4 pm and dinner at 1 or 2 am, breakfast at 7 am and back to work by 8 pm. (wonder when he got sleep!!!) Indira Gandhi even told him that they could stretch the deadline by another 3 months as it would still be in the Silver Jubilee year of India’s Independence. But he said he did not want even one extra day – and finish it he did!
Now that he looks back, he doesn’t know how he did such a massive task with so many huge buildings (one was 108 ft high and could hold 4 airplanes and the entire complex built to international specifications contained so many other buildings, infrastructural support etc). It is actually an impossible task by human standards so it could only have happened through divine intervention. To dramatise the point, Durai Uncle said that Pradeep has been struggling to build one house for one and a half years!
It was good to hear from Durai Uncle as it made his 90th birthday celebrations so meaningful to see the hand of God working in his life to do amazing things. Once again, it was evident that “By the Grace of God, I am what I am.”
Roshini gave the Vote of Thanks and personally thanked many people by name and also thanked all the people who were present as it is family that makes an occasion special.
There was a terrific dinner after this, featuring mutton roganjosh and fish with tartare sauce among other delicacies. Nisha made an announcement and managed to get the entire group on stage for a family photograph.
Giveaways:
As we left, we were given delicate fans bought in Chennai by Roshini (you can see one fan in the group snap on the top of the page, held by Adi in Vasantha’ka’s lap!). These fans were customized in Bangalore by Preeth to say “Heartfelt thanks to Durai’s Fan Club” and on the other edge of the fan “Give thanks to the Lord for He is good” – this quotation was also on the invitation hand-made by Nisha, Rosh and team.
It was a wonderful celebration and we had a great time at Durai Uncle’s 90th birthday. We went away inspired by the way God has worked in Durai Uncle’s life, and learnt afresh what spectacular results come from putting your complete faith and trust in God, no matter what the circumstances.
-Trixie
Durai 90 