Who He Is

A typical New Yorker thinks of a walk in a park with a few squirrels, trees, birds, and ducks if you’re lucky, as an escape to nature. Javed Chitaman was born and raised in New York City, where there isn’t much to real nature to compensate for our fast paced life of constant noise and an abundance of pollution. He thinks this idea of nature is narrow minded and even though it satisfied his peers, he always expressed a wanting of something more. After watching countless hours of Discovery Channel programs which spurred his interest in marine life, scuba diving has been his since he was 14 years old. To him, “underwater” isn’t just a word that describes his location relative to land; it is a different type of nature, a new world of blue and tranquility. “When there’s water all around me, I feel suspended in this medium and things such as gravity and time no longer exist. Seconds and minutes have no meaning underwater, and the only way to know when it’s time to go up is when the needle starts approaching the “E” on the air gauge.” He describes the feeling he gets from being underwater as incomparable to any other, especially the feelings that one can experience on land. There are no buildings to look up at, no avenues to turn down, nor any cars to watch out for. A landscape like this that may seem lifeless to some, to Javed is the most exhilarating thing a person can experience. Scuba diving may seem terrifying, dangerous, or complicated, but over the years has become something that he loves.
Javed’s first experience scuba diving was at fourteen in the Dominican Republic. He immediately fell in love with the sport and felt that it should be something he could do whenever he wanted to. It was hard to explain to his mother why he needed to become a certified scuba diver. She didn’t exactly share his enthusiasm about the activity, she thought it was too dangerous for a young teenager to handle. It was fine to try once, but it would take some convincing for her to allow him to scuba dive on a regular basis. What he told his mother to try to reason with her what that she couldn’t understand because she wasn’t there with him while he was underwater to take in the acres of ocean gardens, to see the thousands of exotic fish, to hold an empty giant sea turtle shell, or to feel the hundreds of bubbles that went up in his face with every breath of compressed air he let out. This very persuasive argument gained him his mothers permission and money to take the Scuba Diver’s Certification test. When it came, he studied the necessary material for the written part of the exam and passed. He also had to undergo open water training, which was fun but scary when during one part, he had no air while 30 feet underwater and needed to perform an emergency assent. Luckily, he passed and received his license to scuba dive just a few weeks later.
“Unfortunately, New York doesn’t provide much of a tropical environment that would allow me to practice ocean scuba diving regularly. I only get to experience it on my family’s biannual trips to the Caribbean. It has become something very special to me that I look forward to each year, especially since I know that the ocean is so big that there will always be something new to see. There always will be phenomenal creatures to see, but unlike the aquarium or the television, there is no glass tank or screen to separate myself from these encounters.” Scuba diving has opened Javed’s eyes to the vastness of the world. He can’t wait to travel to more places in search of adventure and new experiences. Diving has shown Javed that there is so much more to see than what’s in front of you, if you just go out and find it.