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!"