Main kabhi yeh keheta nahi ....

‘You better take … (loss of voice, soreness) … good care of yourself. Be very cautious of your health and …’ she couldn’t actually control the dizziness in the voice and the soreness of the vocal cords because. All I could do was to keep nodding, I had lost the count of the number of times she had repeated her instructions now. She would just not get tired of it and do it every time without fail.

‘It is just a matter of six months and then I will be back.  What’s the big deal?’

She waited, smiled and said ‘You would know it when you will be a father. Then I will see if you will consider it as a big deal or what.’ I could not say anything, just had to keep quite.

My mum is not very fond of us (me and bro) getting away. She hates my job which might demand extended stays away and sometimes even abroad. Every time when I use to leave, she will be ready with her instructions and gushy see-offs. And I do not like them one bit. I hate when she cries, especially on these occasions as I feel that I am making her cry. This makes me feel bad, more so because it prompts me of the fact that I would really not be around in person for her. On top of that, I cannot express this explicitly which aggravates the pain further.

While it was already the time to leave, we both did not realize that. In fact it seemed that the cruel clock was sprinting in the sheer fun of seeing me getting parted of my mum. While, no doubt, that she was crying, I also strangely experienced some blurred vision. I touched my eyes and felt the chilliness around with the swift breeze rubbing over my tears ….  

Mum … I too am scared of darkness … (par andhere se darta hu main maa).

The utter “chronic” discomfort ....... its killing me.

The last couple of days have been terrible to say the least. I cannot think of anything else but her. I have been eating less, losing interest in surfing, rope skipping (the flashy past-time I have been flaunting over since a few months now), driving etal. All of a sudden, especially from the last few days, those memories are haunting me again. That simplicity and innocence is haunting. That aura of positive energy that surrounded her is haunting. The fact that I might be deprived of that flawless smile and persona for the rest of the lifetime is almost causing the adrenalin to freeze and choke and ‘the bodily fluids causing acute depressions’ to shoot up.

This déjà vu, I have experienced a trillion times in last few years it seems. The entities, to which I do get attached emotionally, get denied always. Be it the great educational institutions I could never be a part of, the toughest ‘tests’ I could never crack, the most relishing job profiles I could never compete for and others. The only part missing till date was that none of the entities were causing any emotional pain. Thanks however to this girl now that I am suffering this painful emotional trauma that was a miss earlier. 

I wonder if I could have done anything different that day. That day when I met her and her family, could I have expressed myself a little better? Could I have had taken extra care in discussion with her younger brother over his career; and with her father when he asked me about my career interests and goals; and with her cousin brother when he did asked suggestions over a career with engineering; and had ‘shy’ed away over her grandmother not asking anything but observing ‘I don’t know what’. Could I have had approved to her explicitly and could I have had told her, how much I …?

Alas, nothing of such sort did happened and all I had been left to deal with is ambiguity and hopeless in silence. I wonder, a plain denial would have had been a thousand times better, but that was not to be and here I am suffering with sleepless nights underway.

Amen …

Guilty .....

Not very long ago, I was really enjoying the work at hand; but not anymore. Surely, the driving force, till date was the quality of work, the ambience and the apt recognition and appreciation. Strangely, all these factors still exist but the zeal has been lost somewhere. Why?

A casual introspection was enough to infer the primary causes for the ‘mood-swing’:

- First and the most compelling, the chronic social and family pressure to move on in life, breed a family and succumb to the ‘bhed-chal’. This drives the urgent need to strengthen self on the financial front.

- Second, the urge to learn something new and different and to kill the utter monotony of the usual job. Also, at the same time, to put in efforts to earn skills that would enthrall credibility to my profile moving on.

Now, what these two factors might convey are some dire attributes as far as my character is concerned:

- I am greedy.

- I am unstable and unreliable.

- I am insecure.

Yes, everything said above is painfully true. I am greedy, because my being not greedy would not allow me with an option to choose the desirable life-partner. My being not greedy might be praised superficially somewhere somehow but would sadly tag me as being a risky preposition because I would not be earning enough to breed a perspective family. My being not greedy would be considered pessimistic and backward by a small but important group of people. Also, it is correct to say that I am insecure as well. Because I am a mortal soul and have had a fair share of defeats in life, I am insecure, the success that I relish and foresee as of now, might not be long-lived and hence I have to seek and preserve the alternatives well before. With a lot of external factors driving the equation, being content would not be a great idea and hence I am insecure and would continue to be like that. As from the perspective of the organization and the associated management, I might end up being a culprit – unstable, unreliable and selfish. True, all this is, for not being rewarded for the efforts financially is like a warrior being raised to a new grade in name and not in actual power.

What however, I fail to understand is why the fingers are being pointed on me when this ‘only’ is the path these mythical management gurus followed as well?

The utter discomfort ....... its killing me.

I don’t know whether to feel happy or sad, but something did happen this last time with the end of the process, especially as a reject. It is not the first time that I am relishing the job at hand and an intention to avoid any aberrations that potentially falter my agenda of being married to the job faithfully. But it is just this time that I am not liking the outcome one bit (surprisingly, it did not happened immediately but with a delay). While I have been busy with the awesome opportunity at hand and am almost on the verge of relishing the first harvest of the efforts put in, this just one ‘tete-a-tete’ with this girl had really disturbed the equilibrium, shaken the momentum. And shaken enough to cause the utter discomfort and not to mention, I am not liking it one bit. I must be busy planning, dreaming and living the good times at present and near future, but just cannot because of the discomfort.

Though there wasn’t anything special with this girl, rather it was the simplicity and innocence that one could notice and ignore instantaneously as I did. But yet it was the same simplicity that beckons now and is causing the discomfort. The more I am trying to ignore, avoid and get engaged to the work, the more the increase in the discomfort.

Just wondering why at all I am writing this at ~3:00 AM nascent morning or late night soaked in the black and not sleeping post a tiring journey. Why can I not ignore that face that is flashing with simplicity and shyness and sleep sound? Why is that I am now bothered if I could have had done something to topple the outcome that day? Holy why I had to choose Information Technology as my profession and had to be deeply in love with the work? Why I could not have been a ‘Finance Guy’ or an ‘MBA Gimmick’ etal? Had the things been different then? I just wonder. But wait … why at all I want the things to be different? Am I not in love with the job anymore? Did something happen with such a magnanimous impact that I am planning to shed loyalties? What was so special about that simplicity I wonder? What was so special about that girl?

Wish me sound sleep and luck to get out of this dilemma ….. amen !!

This one is tricky …

Well this is actually the trillionth time that I have written this line – ‘This is actually the trillionth time’ in the mode forcefully penning down something again. And believe you me, this one is real tricky. Though I have to say a lot of other stuff regarding – my terrible times searching a new job, me getting into the dream job (my current employer), then me enjoying the awesome aura and ambiance at the new workplace, then me being rated (somehow – miracles do happen) as the ‘best employee’ a couple of times (that might also blatantly justify my being away from my blog for such a long time) and blah, blah, blah …. But let me not deviate from the austerity of this one.

This one is real tough. Tougher than the mother of all examinations the CAT (aka the Common Admission Test) (this is a subjective view so ‘fill in the blank’ as per your whims and fancies.). And the worst part, there are no coaching programs available for this, no online help or otherwise. Not to mention the immense pressure from the parents and the beloved relatives. And everything is so secondary with this; can’t enjoy my beloved IPL or the Grand Slam or even a pity Movie for that matter (Pirates 4 is already in from a few weeks now.). That is exactly why I am planning to post this crap today so early morning (or late night for that matter).

The irony however lies in the fact that I cannot actually explicitly explain this here and invite fresh trouble from the sundry readers (may it be that you have been my best buddy since long – no matter still). But still I want to categorically announce here that something wrong is happening with me, something blasphemous that is breaking the trivial (25 years old) monotony and I am terribly not liking it at all. So in case any abnormalities in my behavior are observed, then I wish to be pardoned for all that. Please bear with me.

Now, also to make any sense out of all this crap, let me try to share a very known short story that is exactly similar to the way I am feeling right now. This is a story of a cute little young bunny that used to work hard at the farms to fetch the best of the red carrots all for himself and only himself, then after a hard day at the farms he used to roam around freely, enjoying his time with other fellow bunnies during the evening. But this was not liked by the evil old bunnies and they planned a trap to get hold of this cute bunny. The old bunnies had their own complex mechanisms to create traps which were unbreakable and beyond the capabilities of the cute bunny. Hence he was trapped and put under a lifetime house arrest. And then he lived UNhappily ever after ….

End of the story ....