ASHES

I have been infrequent with my posts on this blog, and even the posts that I put up have started becoming predictable. Although that should be the essence of blogging. Anyways, the point is that being predictable is one thing, but there is a fine line between it and being mundane.

Nobody’s life, I believe, is mundane though. We all have our share of surprises, planned or otherwise. Some of these surprises are pleasant some aren’t as much. But it is difficult to decide how much predictability you want in life and how much do you want to leave to the unknown. Week after week, month after month, as I pass through the motions of life, I wonder whether I have the right balance of the constants and variables in life. Confused? I think you have started to understand me better.

As I look back at my achievements in life, I think of what was it is that I did differently than when I did not achieve. Hard work is probably a basic explanation. But I think its too simplistic to relate hard work to achievement. A lot of times a lot of hard work does not yield anything. But from a practical point of view it’s unfair to doubt hard work in lack of success. But then again sometimes, the weight of one achievement can blind you into assuming another. In fact that is not just hypothesis, I have been through that experience once and it still hurts to think about those times.

As another year of our lives slowly makes its way to the ones gone by, I am trying to get hold of as much as I can in life. Money has been a constant issue with me, throughout life actually. Not that I don’t or didn’t have money to eat or buy clothes or something. I still have sympathy for the millions of poor and homeless, jobless and without any ‘life’. But once you get to one place you want to look up and keep going up. And that’s where my fundamental problem lies. By going to IIT, I suddenly achieved something that took me way ahead of people of similar calibre, who were perhaps not at the right place doing the right thing and got left behind. So my initial peer group basically ended behind me in terms of one quantum achievement. And I will not mince words in saying that I am proud of it. But from there on I have had much better peers, who have done so much and so well in life, and now I am slowly ending behind. Not to mention, I am not proud of it.

So where do I go from here, look up and aim for higher and risk falling in the process? Or just look below and live in a celebration of where I am? I am never too bothered about other people’s expectations. I know parents can sometimes ask for too much. But then my parents expected me to do well in studies in college (i.e. get a CGPA of at least 7.5), but I turned down the offer immediately. So nothing can affect me in terms of expectations more than that. But constantly achieving new things and feats lends a lot of contentment in life, which like every other person, I strive for. Maybe don’t get it as often enough. It does make me feel, that maybe I am just not good enough and one good show has got me where I am. Maybe I am not able to carry my weight on my own, you know till school and JEE aai would use the long handle, as it were, if I wouldn’t work hard. But slowly as I got on my own, I started to loose my grip. Of course on the cricket field, aai papa had little influence, after the first few days when I got my first ‘leather ki ball wala bat’ and a pack of 6 samrat balls, which to my pleasant disbelief were also used for the Delhi Inter IIT in 2002. So I did a bit by myself on the field. But academically and professionally, I have more or less failed to get things going too well. And if this is more or less true, then my dilemma is that I know the problem and not the solution.

Of course, as the wise would have it, success and failure are phases in life. You win some and you lose some. It will be better if you, or I, don’t take it personally. But that doesn’t mean that you stop caring about success totally. I guess living the dilemma is the challenge of life. Its like learning to swim, when you go down, the only way you can survive is by telling yourself that you will come up again. Which is funny because I don’t know how to swim and I am not that fond of water either.

The Ahmedabad test match, definitely put a few things into perspective. After a huge win in Perth and a respectable draw in Adelaide, and the 319 massacre in Chennai, the shabby display of cricket has helped set the expectations right with this team. A while back when the Sydney controversy broke, I had said that if we win in Perth, which looked unlikely, and then win the one day series, MI, we could be the next world rulers in the game. Perhaps not, not for some years to come atleast.