People who are due for retirement never think of what they are going to do when they actually retire. Having invested the prime of youth in work, when one is totally busy, one comes across retirement as the period when one has got plenty of time. If one doesn't fill this time with activity, one might feel 'good for nothing' about life on leads.

During my youth, I used my free time to study everything that came my way. One day someone asked me: "By the way, what are you studying?" The question, though appropriate, stunned me and brought a profound response.

That moment I started working on the idea that I had been toying with for months: to write articles for local newspapers.

I knew that the good work of the world is accomplished principally by people who dedicate themselves unstintingly to the big distant goals; to achieve them weeks, months and sometimes years later. But the good work for which they are gambling on is the ultimate achievement.

I have been typical in that I have had widely scattered jobs, teacher, businessman, traveller and writer. No college education could have given me specific preparation for any of these jobs. But it was by fantastic luck that I got a job in a college from where I retired.

I still remember what the faculty told a retiring group of us that “Life does not consist of taking courses in small segments. We’re going to turn you loose on some huge tasks. Let’s see what you can do with them in the world.”I chose English Literature and started going to the library and learnt what I could. Nothing that I studied in college was of any direct use to me in various occupations. But what I did experience was how to learn, how to organize, how to educate myself.

And since then, experience and observation have taught me that it is not so much the original education that counts, it is the re-education, the self discipline that keeps a man driving towards hard and distant goals.

Specialisation for the big jobs, historically, culturally and morally are not enough – what the world needs is the well-rounded human beings. As a Sanskrit proverb says: “Look this day. For yesterday is but a dream, and tomorrow is only a vision, but today, well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope”.