Almost Famous!

It’s that time of the year again. The time to evaluate the year gone by and wait in anticipation of the coming year. As I sat down to complete the meaningless exercise, I realized this was not a normal year. I just turned 25 this year, a quarter of a century, and from what I experienced this time passed in ‘no time’. It is then my mind realized the importance of the day; the frightful day.

This is a particularly frightful day that comes in the life of everyone of us. The day when we realize than potentially everyone who is famous is younger than us. It is that day it dawns upon us that life might become frightfully common for us. The acceptance speeches that we had prepared for the Grammys, the Oscar, the carefully maintained shelf we kept for all the Man of the Match awards all bite the dust, and we woefully start the preparation for a quite journey ahead. The journey where everyday would be the same, the day where the similar faces would surround us for the rest of our lives. We would get up at 7:30 in the morning, our wives would serve us coffee (which would be too hot or too cold for consumption), we would enter the bathroom only to realize that the geyser is still to be repaired and would finally ramp up the morning proceedings with a light breakfast; a breakfast full of nutrients to prolong our ‘wonderful life’ to eternity. The day would be full of files and reports; quietly laughing at us; after-all they never took themselves as seriously as we did. Finally after a day full of keyboard punches and random ramblings, we will reach home en-route cursing traffic nineteen to the dozen. Oh! I almost forgot the vegetables. Anyway once we’d reach home, we’ll look at our wife, throw a painful smile at her and before we can even sit, Mr. Sharma from the neighborhood would come and complain about our wonder kid who has slapped his son. After flipping the zillion channels endlessly for an hour, we’d head to the place where we’ll lie motionless for the last 1/3rd of the day.

Wow! I just defined the most horrible life I can ever think of living. The life, where we wait for the weekdays to speed, endlessly enduring Mondays through Fridays, just for the prized weekend. The weekend, which of-course would be spent worrying about the looming Monday.



But before I could put my pen down in frustration, my mind conjured up the images of an everyday man saving the life of 10 odd people in The Taj. Extraordinary, methinks comes in an ordinary package. Perhaps, life gives everyone a chance to break the ordinary, to perform the divine duty that we ought to perform, if only we would dig deeper into ourselves. Perhaps, we in the garb of the ‘Common-man’ can still break the shackles and redeem ourselves. May be we don’t need the media to tell us that we are extraordinary. A quarter of century can never summarize one life. Still a long journey to cover, still a long life to live.

May be there is another achievement in the pipeline. Nobel Prize anyone!

Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free!!

For some strange reasons today, this fine line from arguably one of the finest movies ever made constantly reverberates in my head. Fear it seems does strange things to you. It stifles your senses and takes away every last ounce of confidence that you have. The fear of failure, it seems is the first one to hit. Every small failure adds to its monstrous power, till we are no longer willing to take risk, till every step of ours feels like one step away from fall. We wait for life to offer us an anti-dote. We wail and wait for the defining moment when we would be able to control our lives again. And then hope sets in. We are able to see clearly again. We tell ourselves for the umpteenth time that things would be fine, we rise. We are no more afraid to fall; there is a quite confidence, a clear vision. We are no more bounded by fear; hope has just unraveled the knot. Life is good again. A reason for living, a hope for redemption.

P.S. Did you know if you type ‘reject’ on your phone in the dictionary mode, it spells ‘select’. Probably Nokia knew it better.