It all started with a lollipop

The earliest memory I have of life is one of sucking a lollipop in the back of my dad's car and staring at a high rise tower on the roadside. I went to this school sixteen kilometers away from my house in a bus which made a funny noise when the doors opened that made all of us kids laugh. The school had tall buildings, but somehow I could never go higher than the second floor because after that there was a door that was blocked by mops, buckets and everything else that Ryaaju used to keep there. Now that made me very angry, because I wanted to go places, and I tried to make up for it by tucking a wooden scale halfway down my bag, so that I looked like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. None of my teachers ever understood this, and they sent me home with notes in my diary saying restless, naughty and a million other synonyms. We had parent-teacher meetings, where I would sit with my most guilty face ever, and yet many times my teachers didn't melt. Maybe the one thing I am very grateful to my mother for is that she never let me screw up in acads, because of which I always did well in exams. Anyway, school was a lot of fun, because I got to see people who were different from me, and who did different things that made me want to do all those things as well. I had a Tabla teacher who liked me so much that he gave me a chance to play on stage at the age of 13, somehow I never thought of it as being a celebrity back then. I still remember that it was in class 8 that I saw two of my friends, a guy and a girl sit next to each other eating the same  Choki Chokiand it made me sick because it was like tasting someone else's saliva. It took me long enough to realize that they were more than just friends. Five years later that friend of mine died in an accident, and the girl moved on. That was when I started really praying. I always feel real prayer is when your prayers go up in the same language as you think in. 

Anyway, by then I had finished my class twelve and as I said earlier, I wanted to see places and I came to India excited at the idea of studying without two pairs of eyes boring into the back of my head - the proverbial independence that every teenager wants in his life. I had my first big fight at the end of my first year of engineering, and I ended up at the wrong end of many shoes. I realized in college that there were people who thought acads wasn't important and I kept thinking they were real cool. I remember trying to be like them, and playing a lot of computer games just to show that I could be as cool as them. As I soon discovered, this never got me anywhere and the guys who studied hard and did nothing else got far ahead of me. I never made my peace with that, and so my graduation looks like the struggle of a country for its place in the Security Council when it can't feed almost half its population. I cribbed most of the time, and rejoiced like anything when I made little victories. I burst my first Diwali crackers at the age of sixteen (since they were banned in Bahrain)  and I went berserk dancing in my first Sherwani at my college fest. I had my share of ups and down in engineering, and somehow I'm very grateful to God for giving me an exit option when it mattered most. The good part was that the option looked so good that even when I didn't know what I was getting into, I was so proud of what I did in CAT that the rest of my life waned in comparison and it just didn't make any sense doing anything else. 

 

One year and five months later, I am still lingering at the business school I joined. I am still restless and naughty and all those things. I still want to go places, and I love being amidst people and watching how they behave and think and how their minds work.I still burst crackers and love getting dressed up in a Sherwani on Dandiya and Diwali nights. But there are other things too. I fight with people a lot less, because in my head, people have become black boxes and you can predict what they will do when you tell them something. So I'm just careful with my words. I do a lot worse in exams than I used to in school, but I'm sure that's only because my mom's eyes aren't boring into the back of my head.  I feel great when I can help someone...being here has given me my first chance to see underprivileged people and do something for them. It feels awesome when you yell irrationally at a bunch of seventy people and they actually listen to you; my tutorials have given me a chance to experience that. An investment bank heading for the abyss offered me a job, only to drop down the abyss faster. 

And here I am, trying to figure out what I want to do in life, because as Richard Harris says in the Chamber of Secrets, it's our choices and actions that define us, and not our abilities. Sometimes I think I should just get myself to some sort of a school and teach there, as I so like blabbering. Sometimes I think doing a nonprofit job is really cool, as you're being selfless and all that. Sometimes I just want to get rich and richer, so that I can cool my heels at the end of the day and watch a movie of my choice in my home theater. Most of the time, I just wish time would stop so that I wouldn't have to think about what'll happen in four months' time...