A Bowl of Elusive

Of all the futile exercises I indulge in periodically, this one is my favorite: I try to map the points in time, where I could go back – with my current knowledge of how things eventually turned out, and do things differently, and see how my life is affected by it. Clearly, I don’t think my life turned out all that well. I know being content with one’s reality is aspirational, but it has never been something I flourished at. So every other day, I think about which pivotal point in time I could go back to and change something so that I would be in a different place in life. So far, I haven’t been able to find that one point that could set everything on the right course. Let me illustrate my point with a few examples. Back in seventh grade, I moved to a posh new school and when formulas and molecule balancing were being taught, I didn’t understand the concept – this ensured that I would never get a hang of chemistry and kept living in terror of the chemistry exams till twelfth grade, aft

How many of you thought you'd become an astronaut when you grew up? How many of you thought you'd become a spy like James Bond? How many of you thought that because you did something better than others this one time in school, meant you were special? How many of you felt like you were born to do great things? I am sure, all of you. And how many of you are doing great things? Some of you? Many of you are earning well, have great families, and have something to live for, but is that the greatness you envisioned growing up? Probably not, right? All of us as children have this wonder for life, this excitement for the things to come. And as we grow up, most of us, lose this excitement. My uncle used to tell me that our creativity comes from this excitement - this wonder - the same excitement that gives children the ability to appreciate animated movies. This wonder, this penchant to believe in miracles, drives a lot of children. As they grow up, they are faced with one disillusionme

Have you ever wondered what is the point to all this? I am talking about life. Why do we live? What do we live for? Someone who had met me a decade ago would be surprised at my asking these questions. I believed in indulgent excesses and living for the decadent pleasures of life. By that, I mean food mostly. I had a small family, including my grandparents and uncle and I never gave death a thought. Then in the last decade, I lost all of them. I made some serious mistakes in life, hurt people in the process and here I am, at thirty years old, alone, regretful and as per the latest reports, diabetic. So, I am asking myself, what am I living for? All these years, I had something to look forward to, but now it is all gone. I have these feelings that I feel like sharing with people, but when I call them, words fail me. You see I am unable to express the extent of the loneliness I feel or the all-consuming pointlessness of life in general. Lately, I have been doing a little bit of cost-benef