Behind the tainted picture of society, lie secret faces of hidden serenity, requiring just one right push to bring forth the bright side of humans, for these men of steel having deep courage, enormous potential & with an unmatched will power have all powers to push human limits & stand-up tall to life, again.
Similar is the story of our today’s unusual hero from village Cheema’s Rehabilitation Centre, Charanjeet Singh a.k.a Channi (sitting in front-middle of the pic from Drug De-addiction Centre run by The Kalgidhar Trust, Baru Sahib) as his friends (sitting around him) know him. Channi’s life saw the most cruel of the crisis, a crash that broke-robbed him off of his own self, his own life; lapsing his entire teenage & career – Drug Addiction.
As a young child, Channi had misfortunately learnt to be independent at a very early age as his farmer father passed away while he was just 11, leaving little Channi behind with mother, a younger sister & his elderly loving Daadi.
The family’s only reprise was little fortune & a significant amount of cropped land that his father had tilled-grown with all his heart & sweat throughout his life; the money & yield from the fields was just enough to support the family until young Charanjeet would grow up into a responsible & mature young man to support his family, taking on his Father’s legacy, his fields; able enough to maintain the family’s living & getting his younger sister married.
As a child, young Channi received a chance to attend a govt. school at the district, not only was this fortunate, but also a blessing as reserved child Channi turned out to be a curious brilliant personality in his primary & secondary years of schooling, he was immaculate with numbers & always topped in almost all subjects till his matriculate, but destiny had stored a deadly sharp turn for him ahead of his otherwise prospering life until one of Channi’s closest friends i.e. Rocky (sitting on his right), was introduced to addictives during a post-examinationcelebration party.
At Rehabilitation Centre, Channi & his group of drug-abused friends shared with us their gruesome tale of fantasy that took away all good from their individual healthy life, like a silent killer in disguise, that could not be seen by its victim.
Channi told us how Rocky was introduced to the most simplest & amateurish form of addiction to ingesting IODEX ( a popular pain relief ointment ); he tells us that this is mostly the first & the foremost addiction methods subscribed by the beginners, the aforesaid gel is ingested either on bread or mixed with cola drink to get a kick.
Rocky, who was introduced to this simple sounding yet the deadliest of addictions that directly ruins the liver & the kidney in an extreme way (even caused death in some cases), revealed that for all addicts, it always starts as a one-time-perceivably-no-harm-fun-activity that slowly becomes a habit that slowly enslaves your mind to itself, making it crave & starve for feeling the kick & high that take you into a world of great delusion wherein the addict feels it’s all getting great but in reality everything good from the victim’s life actually starts crumbling including work, social circle, family & most importantly internalHealth.
Channi, who was previously hospitalized in emergency due to liver failure caused by excessive abuse of narcotics in the form of weed & other highly addictive & dangerous substances, revealed that addiction works in a chained pattern, one substance leads to another. When your body has abused one drug & had reached its saturation point, your kicks will get lighter & eventually the highs will not be effective anymore & it’s then when your mind craves & starves for them at the worst levels possible & you get insanely looking for an alternate that can restore the same of even higher levels of perceived ecstasy that in reality is empty, hollow & temporary in nature – and if there is one thing that remains permanent, it’s the Damage it does to your life.
Charanjeet’s addiction got so fierce & extreme, that he crossed all limits & exhausted everything external that existed around him… loss wasn’t confined to health, but included all that was connected to him, he crashed at academic, couldn’t even clear his 12th, best of his childhood friends parted ways, almost whole of his family’s fortune got either wasted on drugs or paying his medical expenses, including a liver transplant; the father’s field had to be mortgaged, there were no yields for years & the land fell into the hands of other contractors who lent them money to pay off the bank loan.
“It all is like a one bad prolonged nightmare that sucked everything from my life, including my own-self & no different is story of anybody you see sitting here next to me, we all were friends for addiction, our real friends left us way back while we were careless, helpless, unaware, living unconscious like the walking deads”, expresses now recovered Channi with a serene face.
Channi was first brought to rehabilitation centre by his best childhood friend Ratan, who met Charanjeet almost an year ago & was shocked & grieved to learn about his ordeal & his family’s suffering.
Channi, Rocky & the group has now devotedly learnt the value of this precious life; they were given countless counseling sessions alongside spiritual guidance & knowledge that helped them gain control of their senses & get back to their normal lives –
“Our lives are transformed for good, through spirituality we learnt the importance of pain & suffering, we now feel fortunate & blessed that it all was a part of our repentance that we suffered such extremes, had this all not happened, had we not been brought here, we would have lived our lives in hell, we are thankful to The Kalgidhar Trust, Baru Sahib, the volunteers, the preachers & other professional doctors who gave the best of all they had to save & pulled us out from the burning flames that smothered us each day, each moment. We now believe in God, not because other say so, but because we have seen Him; he resides within the compassionate & the generous ones we comes across in our lives”, spoke Rocky on behalf of his group.
~Ramandeep Singh
~New Delhi, 4th Oct ’13
