“Kuch aashayein hain, aur kuch armaan bhi,
Hai kuch gila sa bhi, aur kuch muskaan bhi;
Door tak ki aarzoo hai, hai kuch thakaan bhi,
Kuch zamin ki tamanna hai, chahata hoon kuch aasmaan bhi.”
Cheers!!!! , for stepping into the silver jubilee year of roaming on this planet. Twenty four years gone and nobody knows how many more to go. Life’s crawling quietly, sometimes in the shade, sometimes in the sun, leaving a wrinkle on the face every 365 days. Sometimes it gives a flair of hope and sometimes a cloud of gloom. Am tasting all flavors of life.
Why am I thinking all this today. The last time I knew I did this was on my 18th birthday. On both occasions I was all by myself and what better to kill loneliness than talking to oneself. So I am reflecting upon how my world and my life has changed all these years. I am growing and am growing for sure. I can feel the sense of difference accumulating with every passing year. I had read in economics that the total utility derived out of anything decreases with each additional unit of that thing consumed. Life like a few other things doesn’t follow this principle. The more I have lived, the more the desire to live grows. Every passing day brings forth, things I had never thought of and the knowledge of these things brings forth the desire to achieve things I had never achieved. That’s the beauty of living. Every experience adds that unique value to life. If it’s good, we want more of it, and if it’s bad we want to live to see the better of it. In both ways, we want to live and want to live more.
So I think I am growing and here’s how I know this. This sense of growing up comes when I compare on the way I looked at myself and my world on my 18th birthday and the way I do so now. This is how I feel I have evolved in my own world over these years:
1. I spend more time today on trying to know what I should do with my life rather than knowing what others (even my parents) expect me to do with my life.
2. I vaguely understand now, that there’ll always be things I won’t be able to do and there’ll be things I’ll outsmart others in. So competing isn’t that great a motivation now, but learning is. I am afraid of this because so many people around me seem to be driven by competition and so few of them understand that my interactions with them are to better myself and not to better them. Nevertheless I know that in long term I’ll be proven right.
3. I have read more than a 100 books since my 18th birthday, but it’s sad that, it’s the only worthwhile thing I have done since then.
4. I have a better control over my emotions today. I am more forgiving, less jealous, more cooperative, more empathic, less impulsive and more rational now.
5. Now I can talk with a woman, looking into her eyes all the time and not shift my attention to her legs. This makes me feel happy about myself as I feel I’ve made a successful transition from boyhood to manhood.
6. There has been a tremendous change in the kind of music I hear. From liking the typical hip-hop and Punjabi music, I have shifted to listening to soft and romantic music most of the time. Though occasionally I hear the hip-hop too.
7. I realize now that to stay happy, having a few great friends is far-far better than having a lot of great friends. Though this might be applicable to me only.
8. Till a few years ago, I wondered how a man can spend his entire life with the same woman. Men by nature are promiscuous. Today I feel I can do the same. I think I can love and care for the same women for whole my life. Have I gained maturity or is it some kind of Inertia that I have developed?
9. I realize that the greatest source of my motivation is ‘dreaming’. I dream and I dream like crazy. Every time I am down and out, I dream and that does the trick for me. I know, not all of that I dream would get real, but that definitely helps.
It’s not that everything has changed with me. There are so many things that are still the way they were a couple of years ago. Some of them that I can trace are:
1. I can’t stop myself from hating a few people. However hard I try to reverse my position, I’ll still end up hating them.
2. I still can’t appreciate people if I think they don’t deserve it. I still find it difficult to get impressed by someone easily. I guess in the career that I intend to follow soon; this is the first thing I need to change.
3. ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Charisma’ are still the greatest turn on for me. I find it hard to resist ‘Knowledgeable’ and ‘charismatic’ people. ‘Intelligence’ and ‘broad mindedness’ are still the most important traits I search for, in people I meet.
4. I still lend advice to only the closest people. My trust in ‘information asymmetry leading to competitive advantage’ is still as strong as it was and that’s precisely the reason I don’t frequently divulge what I know. I am slowly trying to get over this.
5. For me ‘Drew Barrymore’ is still the prettiest woman in the world and am glad to see her gain great maturity since the day I watched her first movie.
6. I am still very sad and hopeless about the state of affairs in the country and I still believe that our extreme demography will never turn out to be a boom but will one day lead to the breakdown of the social fabric. Population is the last thing this country needs and nobody seems to address that.
7. I still sometimes give twenty rupees to a kid begging without thinking why I did so and have successfully influenced two of my closest friends in following this trade of loosing fortune.
8. I still prefer reading a good book to attending classes, prefer talking with a friend to reading a good book and prefer going on a trip to everything else I can do.
9. I still write things on a loose sheet of paper, force my friends to read them and ultimately loose the paper without saving what I wrote.
10. I am still possessive about the things I love. Have tried hard to overcome this but unsuccessfully. I guess for once I got to trust what horoscopes read. Nevertheless I won’t mind to keep this vice. Why should I strive for all the virtues?
That’s how the big picture of my life has changed and has stayed the same. I have gained and have lost equally. Have met some terribly great people, learnt some equally amazing things, lost some great moments I wished never to loose and have understood myself and my desires better. I have made a resolution to live my life in my own terms but have also learnt to compromise where I can’t change things. I have learnt to find comfort in comforting others and have understood that expectations destroy the purpose of generosity. I know that whatever I do, I’ll always have vices and have learnt to love them. As the 25th year of my life begins tomorrow, I know nothing will change substantially. Things will be the way they have always been. But the spirit will definitely change. My aspirations, desires, dreams and misgivings will definitely change. My attitude towards my life will definitely change and that’s what propels me to move on in the pursuit of happiness. In the pursuit of a life ‘less ordinary’.
Here's a song dedicated to 'Myself' on living through one more year
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