Destiny to Make

These days it pisses me off to read some 'great' person's life story that begins 'Ever since my childhood I always wanted to be an X', where the X happens to be the 'great' thing they are now.

Well how do people who do not know the difference between beer and lager know what in the big wide world they want to end up as? Come on, spare me the loose talk. When has being nerdishly mono-minded since your childhood become so cool? When has spontaneity lost its charm? Well may be I am over reacting.

I as a kid had this rich uncle in America, who had a lot of money (at least after converting to rupees). So then all I wanted to be was a rich uncle in America. Well now I am almost there. (Depending on whether the department of Electrical Engineering at Tech thinks I am good enough to correct some exam papers in return for a huge tution waiver) .

So right from my childhood that was what I wanted to be. Rich so that I can buy Five Star choclate or a music system. Basically all the things your dad can not justify buying in a joint family. Once I was on the road to becoming a rich uncle, I hit the accelerator so hard that there was no stopping me; halfway trough my ride, I realized life is much more than money; that glory had many more faces. I hit the breaks hard, but my existing speed, with some help from Newton's first law of motion, lunged me into this rich uncle state and to drive back from here is going to be an effort. It is when I miss being a stupid from whom people do not expect anything,
where you can start a shrimping business anyday!

In my last days of college, I knew so well that I am going to be a technology-coporate bigshot that I did not care to apply for the armed forces. That was a big mistake. A man looking for glory, looking to satisfy his insatiable thirst for greatness, I would send him to the army.

Well, that is one of the disadvantages of being two years younger to your classmates, because two years after college I realized what a good option the army was. It would ahve 'fixed' me for ever. The best 'treatment' I would ever have got! Neway here I am at twenty three having seen it all, done it all in the corporate world. Too much appreciation at too less an age, there is no more challenge!

May be this is not very serious, may be I would have backed off in the last minute. Well if I am that serious, I can go now. You and I know it is not so straight forward. There is always the option of SSC. Well this may be only the pensive talk resulting from watching Forrest Gump for the hundreth time. It could only be the confusion of an old fashioned guy lost in the new world of technology. May be the voices of a lonely kid. May be they are for real may be they are not.

Well as mama says 'Life is like a bunch of chocolates, you never know what you'll get', lets see what appears this time when I open it. Somewhere between the so-far-yet-so-near lives of Jenny and Forrest lay your own destiny. Destiny to make or destiny to endure.

Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies are so blue
Sweet Home Alabama
Lord, I'm coming home to you

Basic Need To Blog

Well I have ditched four drafts in the last as many days. So I thought I will write some of it today.

As my friend Smitha was saying in one of her earlier blogs, in those good old days when she had less work at office and more time to contribute to the literature of the blogdom, blogging could be an addictive thing. Once you start a blog of your own, your thought process gets a new nagger. While on the road of thought, when you encounter a beautiful one, you say to yourself 'I should blog this'. There are a couple of things here. One, the train of thought has hit a serious speed-breaker, once you get back to your thinking, it does not continue the way it would have if it had not hit the 'I should blog this' break. Two, face it, noone is interested in reading your blog.

Anyway, I am living a lonely and quite depressing life right now, the bad news in that nothing is really wrong, I am being a cry baby when compared to all those people who do not know where their next meal is going to come from. Where as I know that it is right there in the refrigerator, that frozen food cooked a couple of months ago, half way across the world. The same kind of thing that I have been eating for a couple of months now. The good news is that there are only
two weeks left of it, and I am going to India after this, to meet a lot of friends and relatives.

A trip to my home is a zero-sum-game. I am tired of the world, I go home, and my mom drives me nuts. I am back the same way I left, if not worse. The house to me does not make sense, and the fact that I can not make my parents change any aspect of it, frustrates me. Its like living with the fact that your parents have messed up with your childhood, which btw is in vogue these days. That's why I visited Chicago thrice in eight months, to find a new home with new parents, I guess. This time back home, it is going to be different with all the parties around. To get rid of all the mental sediment from the 10 weeks of internship, which left in the subconscious gives nightmares later on.

Well I want to vent out here in this post. Lets get it done with. The things that are driving me low these days are.
My roommate is an ass, precisely the same kind of ass he thinks I am. Well isn't that what roommates are for? To teach you that the world, or atleast the house you live in sucks! That too they do that for free, ofcourse except for the same free lesson you give them back. My boss does not care. Well, he does not care if I am getting fed or not; along similar lines, he does not care if I took five days to do a job that takes well, two hours. That leaves me with having to walk one hour to a grocery store load my back pack as much as possible and walk all the way back to stay alive. Or leave office in the middle of the day, walk for half an hour get some food for 10 minutes and walk back again.

Though this is my first time in the heart of America, outside the protection and comfort of the Desi Zone, I am not hasty into judging that all Americans are mean, because I have seen some very very good American friends at Georgia Tech. The rest of the country should really work hard and mean to change that. Though the info-mercials, that out right lie all the time and the commercials, that do not mean a word they say, make you want to catch the next flight out of the country. Did I forget the news? How the fuck can they convert someone' pain and real issues into plain entertainment for commercial interests? Now, I know why I am depressed - too much TV and too many ads in between.

Here is another mixed news. Well for that matter all my work has been mixed news. I write a silly piece of code that does something and after days of debugging, it kind of works, but throws up errors, leaving me with mixed results. God save my career.

Well the mixed news I have got now is that 'I am out of love'. Like in a matter of a couple of lines of dialogue, It was gone, like the warmth of a tea. What was previously a sizzling cup of tea is now a damp over-sweetened milk. It happens all the time in the Jane Austen novels when the heroine discovers that the cool guy was infact an asshole. But mine was more like Gone with the wind where Scarlett discovers in the end that she has been in love with an imaginary character for twelve or so years.

I used to rely on this love-thing in those long boring days where everyday is like the next. Like a pig wallowing in the filth. Now that comfortable filth is gone. Should this pig be happy for getting cleaner or sad for losing a comforter?

Now what do I do to escape the boredom of this repetitiveness? I watch TV! I watch serials that kind of show that life is beautiful with a lot of friends around and that a lot of exciting things happen each day. Like Friends, That 70's Show, Grey's Anatomy, Daily Show, Everybody Loves Raymond, The Office, My Name is Earl, The Wimbledon, The World Cup etc.

Well at the end of it, howmuch ever I might feel pensive watching those serials in my current state of mind, I got to remember that those serials have absolutely no resemblance to normal lives whatsoever. Why? If they did, my current roommate, who is also a surgical intern at one of the country's best hospitals, must have been as hot as Katherine Heigl of Grey's Anatomy.