Wonder

Taking a break from Math is on the agenda since numbers aren’t really supposed to swim around your head. Shutting my eyes isn’t the solution since the numbers also sneak up on me there. So I hazard a glance outside the window and receive a pleasant shock. Pleasant shock is the correct term since I haven’t seen a sight like this in ages and the inherent simplicity of the beauty fills my joyous cup to the brim. A passing shower left the trees a greeny green, dripping dew. The sky was a gentle blue grey. It looked like something I’d have drawn in art class with poster paints titled ‘A rainy day’ or something. Simply marvelous with all the greens with bright orangey-red flowers to offset it. It even made the black tar road look pretty in the setting. The beach was a decided gold and the sea a tinkly silver. So much beauty!!! I drank it in like a shipwrecked survivor starved for food. How much I took for granted. How much I missed because my nose was stuck in a book or my mind on a cellphone conversation. To add to the awesomeness, a sparrow chirruped from a wet bough and his brothers joined in chorus. Quite a rare sight (sparrows have gone Gawd-kows-where). It put me in such a generous mood that even I forgave the crows their grating caw. And the air! Oh the air! It smelt like paradise. One whiff and I was made new again. Something about it makes you feel like a new person –cold, fresh, smelling like wet earth and flowers. As close to heaven as I get, on earth.

Taming of the Shrew

I have finally made peace with myself- actually, peace with everything around me. I have lulled the storm within my soul to rest, sealed the cave of the Behemoth inside and temporarily chloroformed it, till it rises again –furious and baying for blood-for the two years I will spend giving society a false sense of security that I’ve conformed. I have consciously made myself ductile and malleable. For two years, I’ll do what’s expected of me (an MBA), to show them I CAN and then wave adios and go do all the things I’ve dreamed of- albeit with an MBA in hand. “Better equipped to face the world,” my parents say, I grudgingly agree. How bad can it be that people automatically thing you’re smart and you have an answer to all their problems? It’ll be that much easier for people to invest in my pet schemes. Yeah! I realized money speaks a different language and all the world changing, Lutheran/ Che Gueveran revolutionary ideologies, I need the moolah. I’ll hopefully get into an IIM –this year or the next because doing an MBA for me from another place is not an option. Let’s face it. This year I was lazy and gave a million excuses not to work hard. Now I realize that everyone at IIM is really not normal they’re completely weird and I’ll be among my own (having to work hard at numbers that don’t come easily to me). So IIM- here cometh I !

destination destiny

Is that really me? Pushed into a vortex of circumstances I have no choice in… Existing, not living, by the dictates of other people- family, friends, society… doing what is needed or required, not what I want or choose to do. And in all this I can’t reclaim the life that is supposedly mine because “I owe people things”… I owe my family for bringing me up, society for accepting me, so on and so forth. But why in all this meaninglessness should I exist? Why? Hmmm…. That is the first word that confronts me every morning. (Blame it on the existentialist in me… and Camus for influencing me) WHY must I get up and go abut doing things as if I mean them? WHY must I study what in my opinion is conformist bulls***? Unanswered questions of the pseudo-intellectual, rebellious mind. Society has always served to wipe out and eliminate entirely beings who question her ways. They are pushed into the inconspicuous subcultures and slowly forgotten. Society beats everyone into conformity0 in the flow of the river, in the run of the herd and anyone who sticks his neck out… “Off with their head!!!”
Must I meekly submit to this stomping of all that I hold dear or should I fight for my ideal ideals and risk getting ‘cut-off’? My own family doesn’t understand why I behave this way…. How do I expect an entire conformist civilization to do that??? “Please be a little more normal!” they beg. But can’t they see? I’m better than normal- I’m abnormal! Under the lie of teenage counterculture I have gotten away doing most of what I’ve wanted to do. But time is running out and soon the validation period to use that excuse will expire. I’ll need to face my fears and tell them that in all this orthodoxy/ compliance / consistency / accord / submission I need to be an individual. Or I’ll have to face the music and finally ‘grow up’. Two words I dread and have come to hate. Associated with untold responsibilities thrust upon members of a society once they are deemed to have reached a certain age- mentally. Shakespeare said “All the world’s a stage…” But this ain’t my kinda show baby! So I’d better get my act together with people who think like me or bid the old life a toodaloo and begin from scratch, away from the influencing currents of all that I have come to abhor in this place.