Father's Day Tribute: Lessons My Father Taught Me

Recipe for a Good Man: A Father’s Day Tribute

He was Baji to an entire town. He was Baji to me, as well. Some recipes get written down. This one got lived. Everyone in town called him Baji, not Bauji, just Baji. Old or young, related or not, that one word belonged to the whole town. He was everyone’s father, but I got to keep the original recipe. In this Father’s Day Tribute: Lessons My Father Taught Me, I am sharing the ingredients that made Baji the man he was and the values he passed on to me. Here is his recipe. No shortcuts, no substitutes.

Ingredients

1 pocketful of chocolates, always topped up, never rationed
A generous pinch of humility, added at every stage
Truth, to taste, with mercy folded in
Faith, slow-brewed daily at 4 am
Forgiveness, in unlimited quantity
An inner child, kept fresh, never refrigerated
Karma, used as the base stock for everything else

Method

Start with joy, not money. Heat a simple life on a low flame. Do not let wealth boil over and dominate the pot. Baji always said love and happiness are the real currency. Everything else is only a garnish.

Fold in the chocolates. He carried them everywhere, handing them out to every child he met. Watching a stranger’s kid light up mattered more to him than any achievement. I still carry that habit, just in gentler form now, a balloon here, a whistle there. My daughter has picked up the same ladle. Three generations, all seasoning( oops, bribing) children into smiling.

Season the truth carefully. He believed honesty should never be chopped. When I once accused him of lying, he would ask why the word lie even existed in the first place. A small untruth that protects someone, he felt, was no sin. Words were meant to serve people, not wound them.

Let it simmer in humility.

He had few needs and zero airs. Dignity, he showed me, comes from ease within, not from what sits in your bank account.

Add faith without forcing it on anyone. Every morning, long before sunrise, he woke, bathed, and prayed. That was his ritual, his own quiet kitchen. He never asked the rest of us to follow the same recipe. Caring for family, he said, was its own form of prayer.

Stir in forgiveness generously. Grudges had no place on his plate. People are good at heart, he believed, even when circumstances push them toward wrong choices. Life is too short to let bitterness curdle it.

Keep the inner child unrefrigerated. At eighty-six, he called himself eighty-six years young. He stayed close to youngsters, picked up their slang, and moved with the times instead of resisting them. That, he said, is the real trick to staying fresh.

Finish with karma as the base note. Never cheat. Never take an unfair shortcut. Do good, and good comes circling back, sometimes slowly, but it always arrives.

Notes from the Chef

This dish does not photograph well. It cannot be plated for likes. But once you taste it, you crave it forever.

Baji’s recipe was generous to a fault. I followed it faithfully for years. Much later, life taught me that keeping a little kindness for myself wasn’t selfish. It simply completed the recipe. I am still adding it to his original recipe.

His voice no longer speaks aloud. But every chocolate I hand a child, every grudge I let go, every gentler truth I choose, I am cooking his recipe all over again.

The whole town called him Baji. I just got to sit in his lap!

Happy Father’s Day, Baji. Still your student in the kitchen of life.