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April 06, 2005

A trip down the memory lane....on second thoughts, lets not take the trip!

A little eleven year old girl, sitting at home on a bright Saturday afternoon, eating icecream and watching cartoons, she seems happy...and now lets move into the little girl's head and see what she is thinking - Radha Lakshmi and Kanchana, her best friends since Kindergarten, playing with her, sharing silly stories, her old Tamil school teacher praising her for her beautiful handwriting, her old dance School, Kalakshetra, her dance teacher proudly telling her mom "Your daughter is the youngest in our class, but she is my best student"...and then we see tear drops fall from the little girl's eyes...she wants to go back to Madras, she wants her old life back...

Fifteen years pass and that little girl is me, her thoughts have become more mature, she wants different things in life now, but deep down, she is still the little girl and she still wants to go back to Madras...


I read a blog today that actually inspired me to write this one. Do you know the two words I hate (no, one of them is not "ointment" and I am not Will or Grace) - Reminiscing and Yearning - I realized not too long ago that I am born with an incurable habit - To not live in the present (metaphorically, of course). To reminisce and yearn, to live in the past or to always struggle to be somewhere in the future, believe me, it is an annoying and unsettling feeling that drains you completely and leaves you feeling dis-oriented and dis-satisfied with what you have.

When I was in High School, I dreamed of joining Bits, I obsessed over it day and night, I really wanted to go to this University that was a world of its own - a fortress standing all alone guarding a whole new world inside it, a world of friendships and heartbreaks, freedom and happiness and I would be lost in this make-believe world...

I did get into Bits and yes, it was the world that I had imagined it to be...but, I was too busy to notice it. I was struggling to achieve that magic grade that would enable me to join the elite, Computer Science gang. I thought day and night of the fun Computer Science students have, discussing cryptic codes, tricky viruses, black boxes and white boxes, so much so that I sat in Computer Science classes, in rapt attention, absorbing every word the lecturer said, while two corridors away, the Marketing Professor was busy discussing the importance of the customer (Marketing, being my core course at Bits!)

Anyway, I graduated and had a job offer from Infosys, a software company and you would think, I would be thanking my lucky stars. hah! I was on to my next worry-venture - I came to US to do a Masters in Computer Science - a dream come true. Was I s a t i s f i e d? Nah...I was busy worrying about my next deadline, my next assignment and how happy I was at Bits and thus, two years passed...

I am now with IBM working on what I have always wanted to work on, and now, you ask me, am I happy? Well, I now sit here, wondering why I had not decided to stay back in India - to argue with my parents - daily, to be blissfully unaware of who a racist is, to take Tamil movies and Tamil movie theatres for granted, to eat hot South-Indian parotha and Sathukudi juice at Saravana Bhavan ...oh, there are a million things that I would rather be doing and I bet if am in India now, doing all these things, I would be thinking "Why did I not decide to go to the United States?".

4 comments:

kamal said...

I think, for all of us we never forget some glimpses of childhood. These glimpses stay forever and ever. These are moments of bliss, true happiness (http://mosakutti.blogspot.com/2005/02/i-demand-my-share-of-pure-glorious.html)

Somehow in our adulthood we try to recreate this bliss, maybe my actions or just yearning for the past. The thing is Radha Lakshmi and Kanchana have moved on. It is your time to be praising the kids because they did something right? :) We should be thankful to our parents who created the right environment for us to have these moments which we will not forget for life. I also agree that we need our own praises in adulthood.

On the other hand, if you do not live in the present then @ 55 you will be thinking, what did I do when I was 25? Also, quest for achieving the next big thing in your life truly means you are living, only if you are enjoying the journey and not worrying about it. I do like to take sometime (day/week/month/years) to enjoy what I have achieved and try not to think “that everyone does that” :) Do you ?

RS said...

I agree, just that I feel 25 years is too long a time to live in the past. You are correct though, time to move on!

BUS said...

Although we speak of enjoying the present I think it is very difficult to do that. However hard we try I think we will always feel the future more bright and the past a bliss. As you said when we are in the present we are too busy to notice it.

As K and u said it is time to move on! What drives us to move on...is it because we have given up hope or because it is the right thing to do. When do we decide that it is time to move on. I am in little touch with most of my college friends becoz they r busy with their daily lives and I am lazy and less motivated to keep the one sided communication going. So is it time to move on?

Anonymous said...

will use this opportunity to crib...
i remember your Madras (as it was called then) craze vividly...
i had no clue abt Madras then, had spent only the first 4 years of my life there and had little idea...i loved bangalore, and spoke better kannada than most kannadigas, did not know a word of tamil...did not wanna leave b'lore
but u dragged me into reading that nasty 'learn tamil in 30 days' book and do the stupid exercises in that...and so we landed in Madras in May 1991...I hated Madras! I hated school, and I hated Tamil!
And what's more, my classmates thought I spoke kannada when i was actually speakin chaste tam!
The first year esp. was torrid... I still don't like Chennai so much but I guess it's home and all, and I'm appropriately senti about it...

dunno what all this has to do with ur blog :)
- Lakshman

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