Category Archives: Life

Blog: Update – 1

I put the title of the blog as “Blog: Update – 1” for three reasons. First reason being, it gives me a sense of satisfaction that I am acknowledging the fact I haven’t written a post for my blog for long; second, there is more than 1 update that I need to post here so more posts shall follow soon; and, the third reason is I am now very used to reading the “BP: Macondo Update…” reports regarding the recent oil spill in GoM published very frequently by the research desk I work for and so it is only natural I pick that up as the title of this post!
My days are spent reading about Oil and trying to figure how, in the broad scheme of things, it would help manage someone’s wealth; where as my evenings are spent trying to figure how to manage the Oil usage at home so my roommates and I keep good health!
I guess once you start working, the mind undergoes a certain conditioning, which is automatic and completely unintentional as well, but it sure happens. I realized this when I was sitting with a friend in Hard Rock Café the other evening. It was his last day in Hyderabad; his stint here as an intern had just ended. Digging into the hot melting dark chocolate on an unusually large piece of chocolate brownie, he was narrating his experiences at work. On the day of his final presentation, his boss asked him “how many hours in a day do you have?” and my friend blurted, “Eight, Sir!”. It did not occur to him, even for a moment that his boss could actually be referring to the total number of hours in a day! He thought of only the ideal number of working hours in a day and said 8 in all honesty.
The other I realized happened with my roommate. She works for a firm which leaves her with no life – both in terms of time and activity. In the first month of her job, she went to office on all Saturdays. She is supposed to have a five-day week but she never saw a relaxed Friday evening or a Saturday morning in that whole month. And then, one day she returned with the biggest grin on her face, announcing as happily as she could that the next day, a Saturday was going to be an off! But the whole of Saturday she kept repeating to us, “I feel this is Sunday!”, “I feel as if I need to go to office tomorrow!” or “I will feel weird when Sunday actually arrives tomorrow!”. Her mind is conditioned to have only one day off in a week – in just a month’s time!
And well, I did not escape the conditioning either!
Suddenly I find, the popular phrase “All is Well” has changed to “Oil’s Well” in my vocabulary. Humorous I know, but it is a certain inalienable truth of my life now!

The Blues and Hues

Disappointments are difficult to handle. You don’t know what you are disappointed with more – yourself or the situation you found yourself in. You don’t know whether it was you who did something wrong or if it was the situation that went against you. But clearly, you are dejected. And, that is why I presume disappointments are tough to handle. Because of the sheer ambiguity they carry with themselves. For a while, you are immersed in a feeling of loss – loss of something good, something you wanted but did not get; later perhaps in the lack of a feeling itself. The vicious circle that the mind then weaves gets you weary to even fight any longer.

I am talking about one such disappointment I experienced today. I will tell you why I call it an experience later. It has not been easy to overcome. Absolutely because of the confusion it clouded my mind with. I did not know who to blame, if at all I wanted to play the blame-game – myself or the series of events that led to the disappointing outcome; or both. And, I did not know of a way to find comfort in my chaos.

It wasn’t somehow a regular college day right from dawn; and yet I dared to march into the unknown armed with… nothing. Or maybe, with some hope against hope. And, as I sit here in the library reflecting on my day that just went by, one thing stands out. Life is not easy. There are days when you become a victim of Murphy’s Law and chance upon the sad realization that the road ahead might only get worse. And that’s exactly what happened today. Being hopeful is even tougher on days like these, but then that’s the best you can do. Perhaps the day was chalked out to be like this, says a friend philosophically. But I don’t know that. Yet, I mean.

Like in most Bollywood movies, where the good wins over the bad, the disheartened feeling also saw a heartening comfort in the end. Sipping on tea sitting outside the college mess, I had a ‘lecturing’ conversation with a friend. So when I say lecturing, you can imagine it to be completely one-sided. And it was not the lecture that was the actual take away. It was the fact that no matter how bad your day is, at the end of it you will always have friends to sit on your either side, who’ll try to make you believe that the script you have been writing for your life will win just when the time is right; that the blues within would soon be replaced with newer, brighter hues; and that there is no greater delight in having faith in yourself, patience with life and wielding your pen no matter what happens.

With the day at its end now, I realize I shall wake up again to dare and march into another unknown armed with… maybe, the experience of having done this before. And, that as they say, is Life!

Conversations

Some conversations leave you with thoughts haywire. It happens once in a while; perhaps when you least expect it and yet by the end of it, along with the feeling of being befuddled suddenly you also have a longing to get back and finish the unfinished business. Say what hadn’t been said. Listen to the missing parts. Understand what you couldn’t. And, come out of the conversation crystal clear.

These conversations blow the winds of change. These are also the conversations that as you try to reflect on, present to you some interesting insights into life around us. Listening to a conversation, I personally think, is one of the most enriching experiences one can have. Not just any conversation, but especially these conversations. I remember a dear friend of mine had written a blog post mentioning a ‘dangling conversation’ (famous song of SnG). And, dangling as these maybe, such conversations make sense only with a passage of time.

Three of us found ourselves entangled (fine! engaged… okay?) in the dangling conversations; perhaps trying to connect the dots by looking back. Some dots did join, some others couldn’t. It almost seemed impossible to get some dots onto the same plane – but then that’s Life. You hardly expect it to be the way it is now. I am not saying we remain unsatisfied always. But, there is always a greener picture in our minds, and we find ourselves blaming our limitations for it. I remember reading in a book, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.” So true!

As the night unfolded in front of the three of us, we became more aware of each other’s resistances, of each other’s helplessness towards reasons – the want of it, the absence of it and the want for the absence of it, of each other’s perceptions and perspectives. As the end neared, each one of us imagined the conversation beautiful, just and perfect; yet as we walked away from each other, the feeling that the conversation in itself was quite a bit better than what we made out of it lingered on.

The fact remains, though, that the conversation is etched in our memories, and nothing that we do affects the conversation – its emotion, its irregularities and its comprehension. One could raise a question on our ability to choose to change our minds and hence choose different futures (interpretations) from a different past (experiences), the grander idea here though is to drive home the point that each experience in itself is a creation of life in its fuller meaning, and not a mere discovery.

Life’s Little Rides

There comes a stage in everybody’s life when the going gets hmmm… well, let us analyze.

This is a stage that you begin with intense Expectations and high Hopes. This is a stage when you have already decided that you are going to put in great efforts to bring out best possible results. You think your life ahead depends on this phase; this can either make it or break it! You are full of enthusiasm and vigor to face obstacles, to overcome challenges. Optimism vibrates within.

And then, you enter.

You begin to settle down. Meanwhile, you also look around to find certain gray areas that you had not thought of in the colorful picture you had drawn with yourself in the centre of it all. You say to yourself, ‘…that is ok. I can manage. After all, I have come here only to learn…’. You beam at your confidence. You feel things are only going to get better from here on. And no matter what, you are never going to lose that positive vibration inside you.

Here, after this part, two things can happen.

First one. You fall into the trap. You become a Dog. You are made to run around the whole time that you almost find it impossible to take even a day’s break and wash your clothes. You hear yourself many-a-time tell your friends/family on phone, ‘Too much work… can’t make it. Sorry!’ You slowly begin to hate the place; hate your desk and hate the very idea of doing this for the meager amount that you get paid at the end of every month. You start realizing of how golden those days were when all that you had to do at night for a quick dinner was say, ‘Chal bey, C’not chaltey hain…’ or how much you miss Bingers’ coffees when your stomach growls at 2.30am!

Second one. You are completely ‘blown away’ by the sudden luxury of living Life King’s size. It is an All Play No Work period of your life. Nobody seems to give a care about who you are, what you are, where you come from, where you go and the types… Nobody wants to know anything about you. You are completely on your own. Your so-called colleagues at your workplace find you amusing. Your so-called Boss looks at you in a way you cannot decipher. You wonder, whether he/she thinks you are a kid and so know nothing and so he/she doesn’t bother much with you… or he/she thinks you are fit-for-nothing, only a liability and so he/she doesn’t bother much with you. Either case, the outcome is the same. So you stop wondering. You realize the power of your new-found freedom. You have all the time in the world – to explore, to travel, to have Fun (something you’ve always wanted to but postponed it to a later date!). You call up your friends often, but hear them say, ‘Too much work… not this weekend. Sorry!’ But that doesn’t stop you from enjoying the bliss of nothingness! Well, only momentarily. And then, you start to get bored. You hate the idleness. You often find yourself appreciating the arduous assignments and demanding deadlines you had back in those golden times. You felt important there, among your friends and professors. It was your world. You feel you truly belonged there.

And you know what this part is called? This part, a small but quite a significant part where all the above happens… this part of your life is called “Internship”.