Inspired

"However, more than Chaos, I fell in love with IIMA second time over. IIMA, hold your arms wide open, because if you look hard enough, you can see me coming. You should be grateful for this you know, it is not often that I so long for something. Consider yourself honored."

- Giddu's blog dated 30th Jan 2006, more than a year before he got thru IIMA.

A paragraph, which I stumbled upon yesterday, while just browsing through Giddu's previous posts. (http://mirroredmind.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_archive.html)


Some stories, and some blogs, are way too inspiring! :-)

That 20s Show

I feel midlife crisis is hitting a little too early :D

March 2000, Bhopal:
I finish with my 10th board exams, they went well. Thus, life is quite cool. Achievements is what I live for. I have friends, and they are the people I hang out with.

July 2002, Mumbai:
This is the first time I'm moving out of home. New place, new people. I miss my school friends. College is starting. I wonder how its gonna be like. But IITB is a cool place! And even before I came here, I knew I liked Mumbai.

April 2006, Mumbai:
Valfi (farewell) just got over. Never realised I would get such great friends amongst these people. I realise I have changed as a person. I've become more interactive, more social, more emotional. I guess thats what 4 years of hostel life, living with 200-odd people, does that to you. I am gonna miss them.

June 2006, Kolkata:
Wow, so that's what ITC is like! A 20-day induction in the "Best Business Hotel of the country" - ITC Sonar Bangla! Finally, I enter the real world. These CEOs and business heads, who share their experiences at the podium, were sitting on this side, a few years back. A great, challenging, stimulating experience awaits! And, I see a few cute girls as colleagues too :-)

May 2007, Bhadrachalam:
LIFE SUCKS! :-( :-( :-(

I live in a village! My project is over and I'm on a piecemeal job right now. I've been told that I'd be allotted a profile very soon, but that "soon" seems to be taking quite sometime now... yes,two months have passed. I live 24 hours away from home, so I can't even run-away to home on weekends... Anyway, I just get a 1-day weekend. And Bhadra is like 8 hours from the nearest civilization, which happens to be Hyderabad, a place still quite alien to me.

For good or for bad, I see quite a few changes in myself.

1. My patience levels seem to be growing at a never ending pace. To every problem, I have an answer: "This too shall pass...".

2. I am learning how to become a loner in life. (Its quite ironic that companies on campus recruitments look for social involvement, teamwork, etc etc., where I see that actually, we end up as loners for most of our times!).

3. Best of my friends are out of the country, I don't get to talk to them as often. With others those who are in India, I never miss an opportunity to go and visit them! While I say life's made me patient, it's also made me repellent to things I don't like. I HATE spending an extended weekend at Bhadra, and at any cost (the high airfares :P), I NEED to make a detour.

4. I get desparate for human company! All I'm living is over phone, yahoo messenger and orkut. I need to be with real people now! I can now initiate conversations with strangers at much ease and feel friends with them!

5. I have started reading! Novels, that I hated to touch, are becoming my friends.

6. I am amazed at how mundane things have become a source of excitement for me: sunday chatwaala, evening party with 50 yr olds, watching two lizards mate, running away from crazy monkeys (I dont mean staff, the real monkeys :P), squatting frogs, fighting with autowallas, laughing over grammatical differences between Hindi and Telugu, etc etc. These things are becoming high-points in life!

I used to think that maybe something is inherently wrong with me that I have phases of frustration which never seem to end. However, one fine day, I was speaking to an old friend, and we happened to talk about how being alone changes us, and to my surprise she echoed the same things! Whilst it was good to know that I was normal, I just happened to wonder if its an early onset of midlife crisis, or is it a little different phase which has been lately termed as the Quarterlife crisis (I discovered this on Wikipedia, makes an interesting read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-life_crisis).

Many of us might be going through similar ups and downs. But we don't discuss. At most cases I thought: "he/she won't understand, it can't be that bad for them". At the best, we keep discussions to "Working life sucks re, college was much better". And I realised that not discussing has made me lose on personal fronts. My friends feel that I've changed, Yes I have, but maybe if I'd have talked out about the situations that I land up in, they would have understood the behavioural changes.

To those who are getting out of college, and especially those who are starting to work, this might happen to you. You come out with all enthusiasm, and then bogged down by the real world. You feel you can do better than this, but somehow you are not able to. You feel your degree/department is of no help, this was something you could do without it. (Reminds me discussing with a colleague few days back: "Yaar factory mein ye sab TPM, Supply Chain, OEE, OTIF ki baatein karte hain. Ye sab humne IIT mein kabhi nahin padha. Wahaan class mein chal kya raha tha yaar?" :D) The insecurity about how future is going to be further adds to the mess. And then it hits you: "Kya kiya life mein abhi tak? Aur aage kya karenge?". Plus there are changes. The place changes, people around you change, the whole mode/style of interaction with people changes. And we as humans, do not like to change. We like the status quo. Bonds that we make in college get hard to give up, and equally hard is to form new bonds. This makes us want to be with the same people we are used to. This pulls me back to Mumbai, the place I am in love with, the place where I have my college, and my friends.

At 22, I feel old at times. Too mature to bother about all this at this age. Thats why I feel it as the early onset of a midlife crisis. I wish to go back to how I was at 18, with all the enthu still bubbling, with the same fire in the belly, emotionally stronger, caring about achievements.. and freaking out with friends!

Twisting the famous Bryan Adam song a little: "I wanna be 18 till I die... 18 till I die!"

Blogstop - Breaking Free

I got a comment today: "Mayank, what about your blog? Enthu down?". I wonder, do I want to write about what I'm feeling? or, can I?

I have been pondering over this for a while now. I've asked quite a few of my friends, "Why don't you write blogs?". There are two most common answers:
1. Blogs are written by those who have endless time in life.
2. I can't let my thoughts be exposed in public
"Endless time" being a relative term, I won't dwell too much into it. What interests me is the second answer.

Contradictory needs. The need to express yourself, the need to be heard, and yet, not to be judged, srutinized, probed and exposed. I guess at some level, and some point of time, this is what we all feel. The feeling of, "Oh I need to talk about this to someone" versus "should I?". A common trait, which quickly converts into frustration/lows. And we prefer being quiet.

Why do we get so defensive while expressing ourselves? Why can't we break free of the fear of being judged? Does it really matter? And what about, "Those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter."? Or is it that something else that makes me/us not write about stuff that's close and personal?

Furthermore, I wonder where is the vent then. People write blogs so that they can express themselves. And places where they really need to express and "let it out" is where they bury deep down. I wonder when would I be able to openly write what I think, and not use aliases/similar stories/spoofs/downplays/euphemisms.

As a (good) first step towards breaking free, I am listing down things I want to write about, but I'm not writing. Alongwith it are reasons why I think I'm not writing about them:

1. Work culture in my company - maybe coz I wonder some employee/my boss is reading it
2. Why did I make those choices in life? - maybe I dont wanna look like a fool! My friends at ITC would echo this :P
3. My failed love life - maybe coz I don't want others to judge her
4. Loneliness @ Bhadra - maybe coz it always feels empty :D, coz no matter how much I express it, its not gonna help.
5. Need for human company/companionship - maybe coz I don't wanna sound desperate :P
6. Run-away from Bhadra - I wonder why I haven't written yet.... or maybe, reasons same as stated in 1.


Adieu, with hopes that one day, I would break free.


PS: Thanks Akanksha, discussion with you finally led to a blog :-)

Celebrating success!

This one's for Giddu's triumph! :-)

Few weeks back, when I heard the IIM results were announced, I immediately dialled Giddu who was awaiting his IIMA call.

Mayank: Oye, kya raha?
Giddu: Waitlist 27 at IIMA
Mayank: Oh, missed! Any chances?
Giddu: Scope hota hai, who leaves an IIMA admit! DITCH! (you can always catch giddu with his end-the-topic plea: "DITCH")
Mayank: Arre koi nahin yaar, GM hai tere paas, Gujju land mein Gujju babes ke saath aish karega tu!

Who knew that Gujju land and Gujju babes are waiting for him... but not at Baroda, right at IIMA! :-)

I always had a knack that he'd make it, he has the right aptitude... except for his grades he was a perfect IIM material :-) Seems that even they weren't displaced enough to stop him from being there.

I have known him for almost sixteen years now! And I'm lucky I have him as my friend. Of all ups and downs he's the only constant in my life. Talks with him are a bouquet: from pure crap to tech jargon to school-n-college gossip to girls to life-sucks to sentiyaapa... it can't be better! And I can't be happier!

Congrats Giddu! We love you! Rule IIMA! (and don't leave a comment saying: "Mayank, THAT was gay!") :-)

My first blog :-)

Ok... So finally I enter the blogging world! Idle Sunday evening at Bhadra, hot summers, a non-existent workload, a finished-novel, and absence of my colleagues has left me bored... and then hit the rhetoric: "What next in life?". Conflicts and contradictions surround me, and then I remember an old friend's advice: "Pen down your thoughts, they would become more clear". I guess its the right time to start blogging :-)

I type out www.blogspot.com, and hunt for an account. A strong believer of one-person-one-identity-one-id (and hence in love with google's strategy of integration of services), I request for jhamayank.blogspot.com, and Blogspot tells me "Sorry, the above address is not avaliable". The first phrase in mind is "WTF, who the hell is that!". Opening the link, I found a page happily saying "STAY AT IITB", and a little note below it "has been wonderful". I realised I had a blog, and I still have NO IDEA of when I made it. The date said 30th April 2004, that would mean right in the middle of my 4th sememster end-sems. Somehow for me, exams have always been a workshop for innovative, crazy ideas and plans! (I can write a blog on it sometime later) . I was successful in recovering it using the "Forgot Password" thingie, and don't have to compromise with yet another ID to remember!

Anyways, the novel I finished was "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed Got Wild and Got a Life". A nice mix of humour, irony and portrayal of the Desi-life abroad. Its not uncommon to find people like Opal, her parents, the HBz, aunt Rekha... I look around and find quite a few matches in each category! I remember a genius-friend whose mother used to accompany him in each interview, each exam, used to carry his stuff around and have a mission plan for each event! Looked like he did all what his mom wanted, not what he did. Am not in touch with him anymore, but sure hope that he's grown up now!

Another song I recommend: "Main jahaan rahoon" by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan and Krishna, from the movie Namaste London. The singer of "Lagi tumse man ki lagan" and "Jiya dhadak dhadak" has sung yet another masterpiece. Don't miss it! And Himesh has done a good job with the music of the movie. Himesbhai rocks! \m/

If you are still hanging on, and found it bearable, and have thoughts/opinions, do leave a comment! Hope to see ya next time!