Bridge Yourself

A decade before the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, experts all over the nation had argued against its being built. The reasons advanced were many. The bay was choppy and windy; the waters were five hundred feet deep in the center; the proposed cost of $100 million was an impossible figure for the Depression-strapped economy; alternative funding by bond election would be impossible without the needed backup; the ferry companies and the railroad did not want it; the War department thought it too risky.

Joseph Strauss, a five-foot Chicagoan non-engineer, was determined to move on with the plan, no matter what. He sold the idea to the public and to the powers that be, through an epic campaign. Instead of $100 million, Strauss offered to build it for $35 million, and finished it ahead of schedule and still under budget. The San Francisco Chronicle called the finished product "A thirty-five million dollar steel harp."

"What Nature rent asunder long ago, man has joined today," said Strauss at its opening, in his exhausted voice. A bridge of 4200 feet removed the "otherness" of people and places surrounding the waters and united them into a magnetic metropolis. As soon as their home grounds touched the edge of the bridge, the residents' status changed. Their properties doubled or tripled in value overnight, and have stayed so ever since.

Bridges are fortune builders, and without them we live marooned. But we have bridges of greater lengths and strengths, buildable other than for travel. Bridges by learning, inventions, friendships, or faith achieve unspeakably larger goals. A peacemaker builds bridges of goodwill to avert conflicts. A scientist or a gifted thinker bridges a need and its answer. Writing to Robert Hooke, his rival, Isaac Newton acknowledged that he had seen what he had only by standing on the shoulders of giants. Moses, Miletus, Confucius, and Chaucer are our reachable helpers by bridges of learning freely built. Bridges of the mind take us to the sages whose wisdom time cannot bury. Far more precious is the gift given to us for bridging with the unfailing, unbreakable truths of eternity.

No man is an island entire of itself, said John Donne. Every man, islander or mainlander, needs a bridge to the eternal city. We are not abandoned on this planet as forlorn beings. Could it be that our estate value is low only because our island lacks a ramp to the bridge?

(Excerpted with permission from 'The Village Maestro' by Dr Varghese Mathai, publisher Pippa Rann Books & Media, price: Rs 5999)