Striving towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

Yesterday, I was sitting in a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, just like the people on that Air India flight. Same type of plane. Same routine—the safety demonstration, the takeoff, the moment when you're suspended between earth and sky, trusting in metal and engineering and the skill of strangers.

It hits you differently when you realize how thin the line is between ordinary Thursday and unimaginable tragedy. Between landing safely and never landing at all.

Those 241 people did exactly what I did. They checked in, maybe grabbed coffee at the gate, found their seats, stowed their bags. They felt that familiar push back into their seats as the plane lifted off. For a few minutes, everything was normal. Everything was fine.

And then it wasn't.

I keep thinking about that moment—how quickly everything can change. How the difference between coming home to dinner and never coming home at all can be measured in seconds, in choices we never get to make, in circumstances completely beyond our control.

It could have been any of us. That's the truth that's hard to sit with. There's no special reason why my flight landed safely and theirs didn't. No cosmic justice or divine plan that explains why some people get to hug their families tonight and others don't.

It's just chance. Random, unfair, impossible to understand chance.

But here I am. Still here. Still breathing. Still able to call the people I love and hear their voices on the other end of the line. Still able to make plans for tomorrow, even though I know now how fragile those plans really are.

This isn't survivor's guilt—it's something else. It's the strange gift of perspective that comes when you realize you've been given something you didn't earn and can't control: more time.

More time to say the things that matter. More time to be present for the small moments that make up a life. More time to love the people who make ordinary days feel like gifts.

I don't know why I got this chance and they didn't. I don't think anyone does. But I know what I want to do with it.

I want to stop rushing through conversations with people I care about. I want to pay attention to sunsets and the way my coffee tastes in the morning and the sound of laughter from the next room. I want to tell people I love them while they're still here to hear it.

Because every day we wake up is borrowed time. Every safe landing is a small miracle we take for granted until we can't anymore.

Those 241 people remind us of something we try not to think about: that life is temporary, precious, and completely unpredictable. They remind us that the ordinary moments—the ones we barely notice—are actually extraordinary just because we're alive to experience them.

So today I'm grateful. Not just for the safe flight, but for this moment, this breath, this chance to be here at all. And I'm trying to remember that gratitude tomorrow, and the day after that, even when the fear fades and life feels normal again.

Because normal is the miracle. Normal is the gift. Normal is what those 241 people would give anything to have one more day of.