Going with the flow

The posts on this blog have all but stopped, not as a result of lack of boredom but unfortunately because I couldn't find the time. How can I be occupied and yet be bored you ask. I am in this state because I have enrolled in a program which shall equip me to progressively leverage my core competencies through credibly meshed goal-oriented courses. Yes you have guessed it right, I am doing an MBA. 

A year has passed since the festivities and the celebrations of having secured a seat in the IIMs. Having spent a year in the extreme weather of Lucknow and experiencing similar variations in work, fun, boredom, globe, bakkar......I think I am finally beginning to understand what MBA is about. However this post is not about what MBA is, and what you should do in college and all that gyan, this is about my current state of mind. 

I have always tried to be a good Hyderabadi kid (I am no longer a kid though), the guys who go for coaching , JEE , CAT, everything planned. In other words if some HR dude were to ask me my short term and Long term goals in my 6th standard I would promptly reply with - IIT is my short term goal and IIM  long term, hell I could chart out a timeline with a clearly defined action plan to achieve those goals too. This I attribute to the schooling/coaching system that prevailed in Hyderabad back when I was a kid. But now that I have fallen, crawled, jogged along the path and have almost reached the last leg I no longer have a target or a plan. I feel directionless and lost but at the same time I feel liberated, it is the first time I have nothing that I want to become nowhere that I want to be, the system has run its course. The future is truly uncertain and I have no specific expectations. It will still take time for my mind to accept this state and truly enjoy and feel the freedom, to let go of the future. 

The future is uncertain and I feel directionless but I am slowly beginning to accept and enjoy it. Going with the flow as they say :P

Counting stars

One Republic's Counting stars sums up what I have been thinking lately

To be or not to be..........

Hey are you looking for a roommate..........
Living alone will drive you crazy.............
Your owner is fleecing you.........
you will die alone........

and the list goes on, these are all I hear from all the friends, acquaintances, people at work , passersby everyone wants me to share my place it is like the universe is conspiring against my lonelihood (I don't think there is a word like this, but it sounds good). I get calls from people I cant even remember from college to share my place, my friends suggest people they know from another planet to live with me. I don't understand whats the big deal about being a bachelor and staying alone in a 2 bedroom flat paying half the salary as rent.

I feel people are jealous of the luxury I have, my freedom to do anything. Hell I can choose to roll around naked on the floor and nobody can stop me. I don't have any of the problems that people sharing a place have. You know like when I want to order a pizza but the other guy is too stingy or not hungry and wants to have self made dal and chaawal I don't care I can go ahead and order because the other guy doesn't exist !! when I go to hang out with my friends on the weekends I don't feel bad about ditching the bean bag, I don't have to worry about it feeling lonely and jumping of the roof and things like that. You get the flow don't you.

With work life, all the social networking sites and the corporate phone plans and half paisa per sec plans it is difficult to find some time alone these days. I enjoy lying around in my house watching a movie and just rotting away on the bed some times and being alone facilitates it. It's not that I wouldn't want to share my place or have a roommate and I am a serial killer waiting to happen, if any of my friends would be working close by and would want to move in I would be glad to do it. It would be better than staying alone, but sharing a place with a stranger is not for me...........

My fridge seems to be feeling alone I need to go talk to it now..........see I am doing fine.

Living on the edge......

The title of the post seems to suggest, me going off on some thrilling adventurous escapade, paragliding over the Arabian sea and then capriciously running off to go cliff hanging or some such crazy fun thing.........but alas quiet contrary to this colorful picture the canvas was far more monochromatic in nature, Yellow to be specific.

Twisting and turning on the bed with the thighs,calf and forehead burning up fighting nausea at times and lying on my back staring through my yellowed eyes at the mustard colored liquid dripping down into my blood stream through the intravenous drip .............yours truly was suffering from Viral Hepatitis A sleeping in a semi-special ward of the Cancer wing of Kasturba Medical Hospital for there was no vacant bed in the student sick room all the while praying the elderly man beside me doesn't have a seizure or any other dangerous thing............. every body but me (fortunately) in that wing had some form of cancer, the man beside me had very low platelet count and was undergoing chemo (the doctors said he had responded well and was in remission and discharged him).

All of my friends were of great help to me through all of this, they kept me entertained brought me fruits made inquiries regarding my enzyme levels, I am highly grateful to each one of them and feel really fortunate  (Thnx Chawda,Zahoo,Rakesh,sailesh,Nandi,pullela.....) for all the help.

Coming to the living on the edge part I was very fortunate to have got a job ( yeah I was picked up by first of the Mass recruiting IT companies that visited) just a day before I got admitted in hospital that is 12th september (My previous post on sept 8 was about the rough time I had had until then........well compared to the past 3 weeks and what I now have in front of me it looks like a joke) had I been admitted a day earlier on Sunday I probably would have passed out of college unemployed.

I was admitted in hospital for 8 days and then the doctors strictly advised bed rest for another week which I had complied with and on 26th sept when I visited the doc he suggested I should avoid stress and take rest in room for another week to avoid a relapse. But unfortunately we have to maintain a min of 75% aggregate attendance to be eligible for exams, so now  I am in a situation where if I miss even 1 more class I will fall short and will have to repeat the final year of my engineering.

I hope somebody (I am an Agnostic so I choose not to write God here :p) is having a good laugh looking at my situation......because I sure as hell am not :-||.

Down with hopelessness..........or am I ???

It has been a rough past few weeks nothing seems to be going right (to shed light on the subject..........it has been placement season and I belonging to the self proclaimed elitist group of ECE engineers with a decent academic background and more than average communication skills hoped to get lapped up by this point in time...), while everybody I know has had something astonishingly marvelous happening to them (I am not exaggerating.....by marvelous I mean getting a seat in the top most colleges in the country and abroad, some getting into companies at the top of the Industry with packages close to 7 figures!!) people from all the other branches who were masquerading around as engineers in groups perpetually high on fun and laughter have been placed in top firms with average packages higher than what most ECE guys have had a shot at....... Well we can say I have been congratulating people a lot and so far have warranted none.

My parents and friends seem concerned, I have been asked to take it easy, calm down and not get tensed, now and again people come up with cliched phrases like "everything happens for a reason" and "there are better things in store for you"........ At a time when being me and being happy or just not unhappy seems to be almost immoral, while most of my branch-mates who are in similar plight seem distraught,angry....depressed, I feel disconnected, I don't mean to say I am not angry or sad.......I am no hermit but I don't feel them as often as I should, maybe its because I have had this kind of feeling in the past......well u do feel helpless when some decision you had taken or something you had done in the past comes back to bite you on your ass, but there is nothing you can do about it. All I know is I am definitely not happy but saying I am depressed seems to be stretching it too far.

I think everything is preplanned and there is very little we can do to change things, of- course that doesn't mean we do not try. I guess we just have to go through life and hope to strike a good patch some time soon......... if at all, meanwhile all we can do is try to enjoy the process whenever we can......all of this sounds really philosophical, but then philosophy has its roots in real life experiences........ah I have now understood why I am supposed to get wiser as I grow older (dekho to kitna gyaan jhada hua hai yahan :p).

Well I hope this disconnection,blankness or what ever it is leads to anger or ignites the long lost fire and dedication to study harder and try harder to get that all elusive success.......

P.S Adnan sami's song comes to mind here kaise kaiso ko diya hai aise waiso ko diya hai..........mujhko bhi to lift karade................. very cheesey to say the least :P

The week that was...

 A hurried and sweaty dash to transfer everything from my room into the cloak room.

A long wait for the bus to Goa.......sitting on a pavement on the road-side chatting with friends........ringing up the bus conductor to inform him about the latest kannada abuses added to our vocabulary waiting there on the kerb for him.....this was how I spent the last few hours in manipal........

A back breaking bus journey ........from Manipal to Goa with my friend trying to head-butt me into a coma in his sleep cheered on by the humming and snoring of my fellow passengers, I counted my hours to freedom from my cramped space in hell.......

A maddening 8hour long wait in a confined area at the Goa Airport ......The CISF guys tell us that we could enter the airport only 2hrs prior to departure, to that we promptly responded with some very persistent begging and pair pakdoing to win ourselves seats in an abandoned visitors lounge just inside the airport under the supervision of the CISF.

An elderly couples first flight ...........watching them hold hands in prayer during take off and landing, looking at their innocent excitement at the sight of clouds and land far below ..........fiddling around with the seat belts in their seats beside me, the couple made me jealous instilling a yearning in me to feel that same childish excitement and pleasure in something as simple as a maiden plane journey....

A week in Mumbai with my sister and bro-in-law ..........It feels great to be pampered and cared......Looking at them plan and discuss  to make every moment of my stay enjoyable was heart warming to say the least.....the week flew by, watching movies (chashma lagake!!), eating 4.5 pound crabs, going on drives,chatting........

A train journey back home to Hyderabad ............A journey filled with ubiquitous wails of small children, shrieking vendors (who are in their way determined to make you eat) ........an old fat friendly looking man with a permanent smile pasted on his face describing his European trip to his son in a loud cheerful voice......a childishly irritable woman's complains against unclean sheets, food, speed of the train, the government, Baba Ramdev......and Band Baaja Baarat on my laptop kept me entertained for the entire 16 hours it took me to reach home :)


 

Change

I wished of wearing trousers instead of shorts, using pens instead of pencils and  driving cars and bikes like the grown ups!!, I can remember myself asking my father when I would get to attend school ........

Oh how I would beat up my younger self now for doing and wishing those things. I couldn't wait to grow up drink tea do grown up stuff !! but I now realize I never really grew up not really in the actual sense of the word at least,life seems to have imposed most of the growing. Not that I am a very old man lying on my death bed but looking back 21 years there have been distinct stages where circumstances have demanded sudden and rapid growth ( i mean maturity,mental strength) I see distinctly different versions of myself never really blending into each other they stand wide apart without any transitional phase in between.

Life now has brought me to another such point which demands massive changes or growth as  I have been calling it so far, I can already see myself changing,.metamorphosing into the next version of me. A part of me is sad that the college life and with it the freedom and chill maaroing life I had is coming to an end, but at the same time I think somewhere in me the kid who wanted to grow up drive cars n wear trousers is happy and keenly waiting....welcoming the new me, because if it were not for these changes life would just be a mundane exercise.