A realistic list of things I wish to do before I turn 25 in a few months' time.

People simply love making lists. What they love more is to tie that list up with a life-non-event which somehow makes it more worthy. If you ask me, it’s got very little to do with the feeling of physically writing something and it acting as a motivating factor. If doing that has ever helped you cross off important things from your life, good for you, for you’re a better human and you need to shout that off the rooftops. All that making a list achieves is relieving some mental space. You’ve finally managed to remove all that glug and now that it’s on paper, it’s time to fill up that space with more unearthly aspirations. That said, there’s also this issue of ‘What next?’

Now that I’ve adequately contextualised my cynicism, I shall proceed to bore you with a list myself. This is, however, a list I will not fling into the trash can unless I finish crossing off each item. Before I come across as extremely ambitious, I only propose to do things that I can do within a week. So you see, I am actually buying myself some time and making sure it coincides with my birthday, as if that’s some grand event, but that deserves a whole rant some other time.

A realistic list of what I can and might end up doing before I turn 25 in three months’ time:

1. Resume playing badminton – There was a time when I was half-decent at it.

2. At least start that story I’ve been thinking about since who-knows-how-long – If not for the story, at least write. A lot more.

3. Watch one movie each week – Already doing it, but there simply has to be one thing that you’re sure of doing. Satisfaction and all that jazz.

4. Talk to her. Seriously, it’s getting well past pathetic now – Well.

5. Finish the damn kimchi story – One damp Sunday, a few 30-day-cycles ago, my boss watched some documentary on the making of kimchi on TLC and happened to read something on the increasing number of South Koreans in Chennai. Cue phone call on Monday.

6. Get the camera lens looked at – Damn thing won’t autofocus any more.

7. Do some couch-to-10k type thing – I know I can run a 10k at a moment’s notice. But something tells me having to work for it would somehow make it better.

And then what..

I've suddenly realised that this summer marks my third year of being back home. It only seems like yesterday when I was in class in Delhi, attempting to understand a classroom whose occupants would run about claiming to be right in a few months' time, with what I can only presume to be - in hindsight - goggles that closely resembled beer goggles. It also seems like it was yesterday when I was wearing my heart on my sleeve, running behind a girl in an attempt to garner her attention, only to be told that I didn't know what I was doing. Why, thank you, Miss.

Sometimes I am a sellout. I go on this diatribe about nostalgia being useless and how indulging in the past doesn't, in any conceivable manner, affect anything that should matter, other than may be make you pause and waste time, for whatever it's worth. I don't understand things. When I don't, I try to and when I don't, I am heartbroken.

*

What I am undergoing right now at work can be summarised by something someone said, I can't for the heck of it remember who. If you're good at three things, he/she said, it's the perfect scenario. If, for instance, you're good at sticking to a deadline, your work is good and your colleagues love interacting with you, that's the ideal scenario.

I am not, thankfully, a slave to that ideal. I am a pain to work with. My senior colleagues have all but gone down on their knees begging for me to discuss story ideas with them, but may be they've unleashed a monster (heh, it's good to flatter the self at times) by not appointing a colleague for me to work with.

*

I find myself, disturbingly, in the same situation that I was in this time last year, with regards to work and my plans for the future. When the plan was about to go haywire this time last year, I told myself I'd make some radical changes. May be having to live alone is a big change enough - or may be I've convinced myself of that.

Things change and shit happens and you're glad and you lose sight and you travel the circle like some blind fcuker with a misplaced sense of elevated confidence. You watch and attempt to understand work that is supposedly inspirational and life changing and it ends up having the same effect on you as the terms drag co-efficient and pitch and yaw would have on a three-year-old. You begin to think the wall you built to repel the advises of chatty folks had outlived its purpose. You might come to realise that there's little you can do and will do and you start blabbering in your head and you think it'll sound better on paper and start to write and your pen won't work but you have to put it down so you reach for a keyboard connected to a bright screen and you start typing and you realise the crap-factor of your thoughts hasn't changed in over years. That makes you happy.

Nudge

You're sitting somewhere, physically present at the social gathering or event, doing what is appropriate and yet, you're not. Mentally, you're elsewhere, wondering about the route to take back home, taking a lengthy glance at those long legs right until the time someone in your group or the owner of those shiny legs realises you're watching, thinking of that annoying conversation that you had with that person last night and how that's left you mentally drained and not in the good way. And then, there are those times when there's an incredible urge to write.

Write what? That one thing in your head that's up to here with intensity, that incredibly mind boggling idea that you've had marinating in your thoughts for all this while that has finally taken a solid shape, a form, big enough to want to get out of your head in a hurry. To talk about it to someone is useless. They'd never get it. It's yours, for it has been impregnating your every living moment, apart from the time you cheekily glanced at those legs, ever since it popped into your head during one of those mind-numbing moments social events.

Let it rip. To allow it to stay inside is as big a crime as chucking a bottle of Jim Beam down the drain. However, wait. Wait till you simply can not wait any more. A half-baked idea is as good as an umbrella in Antarctica. Nobody's going to reward you for pushing out half-assed ideas. Let it stay there till it simply has to come out, growling and tearing apart at the seams. Little nudges do help along the way.

And then, revel in the joy. Smile. Restart.

Back against the dam

Self-deprecation and I go a long way, so long in fact that we're often hanging out in bed after hours. But if there's anything appreciable, there is this insanely cheeky ability to take a step back and see things as they are. Whether that helps, I am not sure. But the objectivity, or at least what I term to be objectivity, is at times so easy to achieve - If I can call it an achievement - it is very very scary. So scary, it makes me wonder if all this is just a trick of the devil.

There is then this concern regarding the easiness, if this is all a by-product of wanton detachment. Let's not even get to how scary that shit is.

This objectivity though, prized as it may be, rarely solves a purpose. As in, it's all fine and dandy to sit back and watch the show unreel, but what use is it if it does not instill in you a sense of judgement. Now that, that really makes the underside of my pants turn all murky.

A little bit of this and a lot of that

Oh yes, this year's ending. I begin to thank whoever remembers to flick the calender each day, only to be interrupted by the thought of having to face another year soon. Suddenly, the person in-charge of the calender looks like a bulls eye my quiver can't resist.

Some people, make that most, never seem to appreciate the magnitude of restraint it takes to do something. Even the short and cynical guy can at times be hopeful that there is a face in the crowd that can see what a struggle it is. What is done is, more often than not, praised till the skies dry up. What isn't done, however, is barely recognised. What isn't done, when it so easily could have been done.

Sachin Tendulkar has retired from ODIs. Unfortunately, or fortunately, this feeling of the world-crumbling-around-me-for-I-do-not-recognise-it-without-one-of-the-surest-signs-that-has-been-around-since-I-bothered-to-look-over-my-shoulder isn't new. When Michael Schumaher retired, I wept. I sat smug in college for an entire day, blaming everything from a squeaky chalk to a lime juice with less-than-normal sugar for why the world looked darker than usual. And then again, six years later, a familiar feeling. Only this time, it was amplified a million times, thanks to the knowledge that I will not, for whatever reason, be subjected to that insurmountable joy once again. Fans of Shahid Afridi (*points and laughs at any such person*) might know this feeling.

The dashing guy that I am of hopes and dreams, yet another task was fully completed over the course of this week. Sadly, however, the results weren't premeditated. 

An incredibly crude joke I made in Shanghai might have made the night at that table, but the knowledge that that particular punch line had landed on the ears of six people from four different countries is only exponentially multiplying the cringing.

While time tested patterns are running their course and refreshing themselves, I sit in my same old corner wondering what I did differently this time to avoid those patterns and how, despite what seemed like best of my efforts then, they still managed to repeat themselves.