This is ME!!!

Okkk, statutory warning: this post is not about Deloitte, not about Hyderabad, not about SCMHRD and not even about the self-deprecatory humour that is the hallmark of this blog (which explains the hits)…
This is a totally and completely selfish post, it’s about ME and it’s going to be boring and rambling and LONG!!! So people looking for cheap thrills, take a hike!! And err, on that sulky note, “Happy New Year”!

So today is the Bengali new year! My parents woke me up to wish me… I mumbled something in my sleep and hung up. Then my uncle called (the same uncle whom I worshipped even till a few years back) and complained that I have completely drifted apart and haven’t even bothered to give him my new number. I again mumbled some feeble excuse and hung up. My cousin sister (we were inseparable when we were growing up) had a baby a couple of days back and I still haven’t spoken to her… so you see a pattern here- I am slowly getting lost in my own world (and it isn’t even a very happening place) and in the process losing touch with my roots.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this… lemme go back a couple of decades. I was born in a strictly middle class Bengali family and my parents really had to struggle to make it through the month after paying the rent and buying baby food for me. Yet, I had the best childhood that one could possibly gift their children. Even without siblings and in spite of working parents, I never had the chance to feel lonely. I grew up in a small two bedroom rented apartment in a modest locality, my evenings were spent running around on the streets with children of “disadvantaged background” (most of them didn’t make it to college) and the concept of phones (mobile or landline), computers, video games and even television simply didn’t exist. But I had a family: loving sensible parents, a maid who scolded me but loved me like her own sister, doting grandparents and an extended family of n number of cousins, aunts and uncles who got together for every little festival! I did reasonably well in school (with the constant remark of “can do better” but I never did better mostly because I spent my time playing kabaddi and pittu and marbles). I religiously enrolled for dance classes, drawing lessons, swimming and thereby fulfilling the middle class dream of “jack of all trades, master of none”… but I did manage to complete two diplomas in Bharatnatyam in nine long years of rigorous training though I hated giving up playing cricket twice a week for it. And like every middle class Bengali family we went for vacations twice a year…

Then came my dad’s rather meteoric rise up the corporate ladder and with that a bigger house, a new car, foreign holidays instead of conducted tours in India, long hours in the office and less time as a family. I was a typical adolescent for whom friends became more important and parents, an embarrassment (come on, we have all been through that phase… don’t judge me, if you are still reading that is…) Along with teenage, also came the baggage: career choices, peer pressure, obsession with weight and er, boys! I automatically took up Science in my 12th standard because, well, because that’s what the bright kids do right, and my Class X board exams marks told me that I am a science wizkid, the next Marie Curie in the making! So yeah, the next two years were spent in misery as I tried to find my way through organic chemistry, respiratory systems of toads and laws of reflection and in the process got even more lost. So I royally gave up and instead found refuge in English literature- the only subject that still made some sense. I read whatever I could get my hands on and found refuge in my diary as I secretly shifted my role model from Marie Curie to Ann Frank! Also, the fact that the cute boy-next-door refused to reciprocate my teenaged infatuations along with my miserable performance in school gave plenty of fodder to a budding poet. I still don’t know how I managed to secure a first class in my boards but thankfully with all the cutoffs being over 90%, I made sure that I wasn’t allowed to enter the hallowed portals of engineering colleges. That would have been a disaster! So I did what any self-respecting person with below average marks will do: studied Arts- the godforsaken stream that no parent (especially if they are as educated as mine are) will let their children study… (Continued)