Life.Questions.

Steal my laptop. No seriously, I will leave the thing outside the front door tonight, power cord and bag included. Just hop in over the garden hedge and pick it up. I will sponsor your trips to the malls all my life. And for all you single engineering students out there, videos are in F: drive.

If you think I am not serious about this way to get rid of work, you need a little newsbreak on my life.

Last eleven days, I have been on six flights. I have been getting out at 8.30 in the morning and the earliest I came back one day was 8.45 pm , when my sister asked “Half Day today?” as I stepped in through the main door. Today is a sunday, and I have spent five hours since morning on an excel sheet with bright red and yellow colored rows and columns and a whole lot of numbers which was interrupted only once , when my mother asked me if I was actually nuts , or only looked like one.

And if all this is a chocolate cake, the cherry on its creamy head is that I still get calls from Head Office which start with “I am still waiting for that data” instead of a hello.

And while I was doing this stuff, nature nudged me a bit more towards the gates of “Um, do you have pond’s anti ageing miracle cream?” club. And there is something strange about turning 26. One moment, you are 25 and before you can finish a garlic bread, you are 26 and thinking “Huh, so by the next world cup, I will be almost 30.”

You know, it changes something in the way you think. You realize that marriage and kids and a life when people depend on you for their expensive earrings and indecent beauty parlor bills and maths homework may be closer than you think.

People think being a teen is confusing, but I think the questions one faces at 26 makes being a teen look as simple as peeling an orange.

For one, there is work, which isn’t getting any lighter. And being from IIM, people expect you to sell a shampoo bottle to Anupam Kher. Not that I worry about that, but the mentally convoluted types who need an excuse to run you down are like “Oh, the sales are up only 18 percent? And the money we spend on you IIM types, eh.” Since I am talking work here, tell me how it is if you have used Fiama Di Wills on your hair. It’s the shampoo I am helping launch in North India these days. If you haven’t heard of it, it says that either you live under a rock or I need to spike up my marketing noise.

Also, and this is more complicated than a psycho’s mind, is the human relations part. You realize that unless you clear up your mind and drop that “Uhm-err-I-I-don’t-know” phrase, two years down the line you may find yourself eating dinner with a girl who is thinking “Shit.Why did I marry a guy with such terrible table manners?.”

So I need to wake up to the fact that choosing a life partner is a decision as huge as Jupiter. And I need to find a girl who is happily excited to see goofy table manners.

I have had the coffee-movie-pizza thing with friends who are girls, but in some years, I will need to find a girl whom I understand and who understands me and decides much more than which pizza to order. And finding her is not easy, considering that I think girls are indirect, complicated, get angry too fast and ask questions only to hear the answers they want.


So all this, and add to that a jerky internet connection which takes slightly longer than a test match to load blogger, thick Gurgaon traffic and a cellphone which keeps ringing, and life gets a little jumpy for me at 26.

In a childish sort of manner, I want to ring up god and ask him “Hey, can we rewind my age by four years, I am not exactly ready for this!”, but I think he will just bang down the receiver.

But the good part is that this time my parents actually bought a cake for me. And even though I think they did it because they wanted to eat cake, blowing candles with three people singing the birthday song around me was something out of a childhood album.

But if I look at the overall stuff, I need to bring back some balance in my life .I need to ask myself some questions. I need to find some answers .How do I do that? I will figure it out right after I finish working on that excel file with red and yellow rows.


By the way, if you are emotionally moved by the questions I face, here is one you can help me get off my mind –

I need to get a laptop for my dad. He needs to develop no satellites communication software using that. So we can use a laptop which is good enough to handle the routine stuff . Any suggestions?