Money matters

Well, well, well. This internship is turning out to be quite a learning experience! There have been so many firsts already. For the first time, I’m living in a flat with 2 other MS employees, for the first time I’m cooking for myself and more importantly, likely it, and for the first time yesterday, I had a 3 course meal at a 5 star hotel’s restaurant. Now, how’s that for firsts! But as usual this stupid conscience of mine (or do i mean my brain...inconsequential anyway) always ends up noticing the wrong things and brings in an element of sadness into all things I do, no matter how grand. Last night was a great experience in terms of the people I saw, in terms of the food I ate, in terms of the way I was treated and served but still there was a feeling of detachment that justwouldn’t let go of me. I saw a glimpse of money in everything around and not just any money…BIG money, from the cars that people drove up in, to the clothes they wore, to the food they ordered, and even, to the way they talked. It all reeked of wealth and money. I realized that I do not belong to this world…yet! This thought made me question myself, “Do I really ever want to belong to this place?” I’m not saying all those people weren’t good and kind souls or that it was in any way bad for them to be splurging like this but do ‘I’ want to have all that and lead that kind of a lifestyle? The answer even surprised ME! I realized that I DO NOT want that life of money and style. I really don’t. There should always be certain things in life that are a luxury. Its only then that you value their true worth, else the term luxury itself loses its meaning if one endeavors to make it commonplace which we all are hell bent on doing in each of our individual lives. When we say we want to reach for the stars, all we actually mean is that we want to dine in fancy restaurants, wear stylish clothes and mingle with rich people. But those are not the kind of stars I’ve always wanted to reach for. My stars were oh-so-different. I always envisaged a life for myself that had just enough of everything – love, happiness, success and a small sprinkling of disappointment evenly spread over it all, just to keep me on my feet and grounded, always. Also, because its only through the disappointments that I can truly appreciate the other blessings in my life. And money ALWAYS corrupts. There is no limit to how much a human being can get used to. The level of satisfaction is individual specific. So, it’s for each one of us to decide what’s “enough’ for us. People who choose to run after money all their lives aren’t the ones to be pitied, the real unfortunate ones are those who never knew that they had another choice!

 

Just another sunday.

It is one of those days when time seems to have come to a standstill or rather when I seem to have lost track of it. With thunder and lightening in the background, the ambience is perfect for a session of retrospection and wonder about where my life’s headed and where I want it to go. I’m experiencing one of those rare flashes of insight that give meaning to life and living, a moment when you look at your own life objectively, sometimes critically and come to terms with what you have made of it or want to make of it. It is a time when everything that is important or ought to be important in life is crystal clear, no ambiguities, no doubts and no deliberations.

Sometimes, just some time by ourselves works wonders to resolve all the knots that we tend to tie ourselves up in, in our day to day life. The misfortune of the hour lies not so much in the lack of solutions to problems but rather the lack of time to come up with these solutions. There is a phrase I’ve often come across in those quaint li’l stories of yesteryears that are such favourites of mine – if you are unable to solve a problem, sleep over it. Your mind will usually work out the problem by the time you wake up. But I guess this adage would only hold true if we kept all other factors constant (that’s the engineer in me talking). I guess, in today’s world, each one of us has become so obsessed with success, professionally that is, and are so encumbered with all kinds of problems that the precious few hours that we give our poor mind to relax have become largely insufficient to sort through the problems, much less come up with solutions. We often complain of not seeing the sense in all these age old ways of life but I think the problem lies elsewhere. I think we just tend to ignore the accompanying details and conditions of a lot of these old sayings and simply dismiss them thereon for lack of credibility and inconclusive proof. Yes, sleep does help to sort out a problem if that’s the only one you go to sleep with. But these are subtleties we’d rather not be burdened with, right?

Anyway, coming back to the point before I stray too far and take this in a totally different direction than where I want it to go, I’d just like to state that I miss the good old days. This, at the cost of sounding middle aged and boring . Well, one of my very close friends did point out that a lot of people in all ages have often wished to have been born in a different time just because we humans have this weakness of imagining that any time but ours would be rather better than the one we are living in. I agree but that doesn’t stop me from missing the essence of the good old days – time. Yes, TIME, a commodity that has become a rarity now, especially if success is on the agenda. I feel sad about the lack of time in our lives nowadays. There seems to be such a mad rush for everything, from travel to shopping, from eating to working to even talking. Everything has to be done faster. Efficient execution is the order of the day. There’s no time to just sit back and relax and enjoy. It’s all about speed. For instance, in reading, its about extracting maximum information in the minimum time, its about obtaining what is relevant from the long text, leaving out extraneous details. According to me, it just kills the essence of the book. It detracts substantially from the joy that is reading. When I read a book, I prefer a slow perusal of the words, trying to feel what the author wants to me to feel. If the author took the trouble to write two pages describing a particular flower, then I think its worth understanding why, by playing along and seeing what we are being shown. But no, now, these are irrelevant details that can be ‘skimmed’ over. This is especially true of every CAT aspirant in the country. Its all about ‘speed reading’. I agree what the CAT tries to do is look for people with the ability to handle large volumes of data in small amounts of time but then I’m sure that these data wouldn’t be of a literary nature, would it. And if it is, shouldn’t we be allowed to take our own sweet time to savour it rather than being rushed into gleaning useful information from it? And who defines “useful”, by the way? I hold literature sacred and such blatant dissection of it on the basis of “usefulness” to my mind, at least, is a sacrilege.

On a different note, how many of us have recently sat under the stars and admired the vastness of the universe? This question is only applicable to the lucky few who at least get to see a star cover at night contrary to those living in the “big” cities where “stars” of the celestial kind, contrary to the human equivalents, must be a species unheard of. Not many I’m sure. I still remember a time when me and my brother would be walking on the terrace of our house with our parents and asking them all sorts of questions about the universe and feeling this awe inside, at how insignificant we all are compared to what is out there. I remember those times to be my first odysseys into the mysteries of science. It not only gave vent to my curiosity about nature and its works but also gave me sweet memories with my family to cherish a lifetime. I know Wikipedia or any other source online would be a much greater authority on my questions than my parents ever were, but I wouldn’t exchange those moments for anything because those times, spent learning and laughing about things together, are things no one can ever steal away from me. they imparted knowledge of a very unacademic nature that’s not to be found in books or online. It taught me the meaning of “quality time” spent with people you love even if its spent pitting your limited knowledge against that of your sibling or if its spent asking every conceivable how, why and what question to your mom and dad. I wouldn’t trade those moments for anything in the world.

In these moments of realization, I just somehow want to preserve this clarity of thought about the important things in life so that I never lose sight of them in this mad rush of life that I see all around me. I just hope that I’ll always find it in me to be patient and to savour the joys that are ours to behold and enjoy. I hope I’ll always be able to distinguish the more important things in life viz. my loved ones and friends from the relatively unimportant ones viz. fame and money. In that lies true satisfaction and contentment for me and I hope I never lose sight of that!