India, Aug. 7 -- We are taught to measure our lives in usual currencies: The schools we pass through, the cities we adopt, the degrees we frame and hang on a wall. But somewhere along the way, I began keeping a stranger ledger. I started marking the milestones of my youth by the improbable, recurring arrivals of a man who never once knew my name-a star waiting at every major crossroad: Farhan Akhtar. The first arrival came in 2012 at Yadavindra Public School in Patiala, when I was still more boy than man. That season, our sleepy campus was seized by the controlled chaos of a film unit. Cables snaked across quadrangles, reflectors bloomed like metal flowers, and a reverent hush fell over us adolescents. Farhan Akhtar had come to shoot Bhaag Milkha Bhaag. We watched, breath held, as a Mumbai actor dissolved into a Punjabi legend - the coiled sinew, the stubble, the haunted eyes of Milkha Singh. There was a poetry to it I was too young to name: A son of Punjab being resurrected on the very soil that had made him, while a hall of Punjabi schoolboys looked on. The Flying Sikh ran again, and we, without knowing it, were watching a story about running that our own lives would soon imitate. Then I graduated, packed my certainties into a trunk, and ran westward to Pune to read law. The years at Symbiosis smelled of monsoon on hot tarmac, library dust, and cutting-chai steam-the backdrop to a boy slowly hardening into someone with opinions and a five-year plan. The second arrival came in 2018. Farhan returned not as an actor, but defiantly as himself, a rockstar, for our college festival. By then, I was no longer a spectator. As part of the crew, I was buried in the unglamorous machinery behind the music: Chasing police permissions, printing passes, and managing the artist's rider. When the lights blazed and that gravel-and-smoke voice climbed over the crowd, I watched from the wings-up close, near enough to catch the sweat and shut-eyed concentration. The boy who had once watched from a Patiala field now stood feet away from the man himself, having helped conjure the very night he sang into. We had both changed costumes: He from a runner's vest to a rockstar's swagger; I from an awestruck schoolboy to one of the unseen hands willing the evening into being. Then I ran again-across an ocean to the London School of Economics. I had assumed I was leaving that particular thread of my life coiled somewhere on the subcontinent. But India, I was learning, has a way of finding you in the most unlikely rooms. It found me in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre - the great tiered amphitheatre at the heart of LSE. That night, the raucous performer of Pune gave way to something quieter. Farhan began to recite not his own words, but his father's-the poetry of Javed Akhtar that smouldered through Zindagi Na Milega Dobara. Lines about seizing this one life before it slips away. In an instant, the drizzling London evening dissolved, bridging the 6,000 miles back to the sun-baked plains I had come from. A father's words, borrowed by a son, spoken to a young man who had been trailing that son across three cities and 11 years. My first encounter had been with a film about a man who ran to outrun his past; my last, with a poem about running toward a fuller life. Between the two lay my own small marathon. Farhan Akhtar will never know he was my landmark, but that is the quiet gift of the artists we grow up with: They walk beside us anyway, standing at our crossroads, wearing new faces, holding up a mirror in which we catch, with a start, exactly who we have become....