Woh CA ki class

Writer’s note: I compose this post in my head as I return after meeting my CA friends, some of whom I have met after close to two years. Please condone the over-sentiness of this post.

When most qualified or semi qualified CAs are asked what they recall about their “process of completing CA” days, they would mention their heavy CA modules, horrible routine of May and November attempts or the torture they went through as interns. When I am asked the same question, however, I always promptly say, “my CA friends”. These are the friends I made during my CA tuition classes who have been kind enough to put up with my nonsense and whimsicalness till date.

It was a rainy day in August 2005 when I entered the CA tuition class for the first time. I was painfully shy and I had joined the class one month late. As a result, all the bonding between the 20 odd classmates had already happened and I was the outsider. I kept telling myself it didn’t matter and that I was there to study, but my heart would sink during break times when everyone would be talking and joking and I would be sitting in the corner and pretending to go over class notes. I had grossly underestimated the kindness and goodness of my classmates, and before I knew it, Peekay (named this way since his real name has the same initials) came up to me and started telling me how he knew me through some common friends. Then the Angel (I have no other name for her-she was and am sure still is the guardian angel of our group) took me into her fold and made sure I sat next to her in class till I became more comfortable. One after the other, each person in the class started befriending me and treating me just like one of them. I felt very loved, wanted and cared for and began to look forward to the class that I used to dread going to not so long ago.

Before I knew it, I had opened up to them totally. They put up with my tuneless singing during the breaks, included me in all their post class plans (and never stopped inviting me although I never went) and even tried to match make between me and another classmate because for some weird reason, we always wore the same color (for gods’ sake, I started wearing pink thinking it was the most feminine color only to find him in pink too!).  Being a huge group, there were the routine fights, crushes, relationships and breakups.. but the group stayed. They included me to such an extent, that I bonded not only with them, but also with their friends who weren’t in the same class. I had a great time throughout the duration of the class and learned not only accounting and taxation, but also lessons in friendship, bonding and loyalty.

At some stage, I went through a horrible patch and cut off from all of them. They were so loving that they never gave up on me. In those two years that I was away, they kept trying to reach out to me in any way possible. And when I did get back in touch, they forgave me and welcomed me back. ( Of course, there were wise cracks about me being the Aamir Khan of 3 Idiots, but that was the least I could expect.) Even today, I have hurt some of them by not attending their weddings, by disappearing for months at end…but they swallow their anger and accept me each and every time.

Today it is close to a decade since that first class. The group has weathered many, many storms. The untimely demise of the one we all loved the most, exam failures, relationship failures, loss of parents, job crises, quarter life and identity crises-but the bonding in most part has stayed intact. It gives me immeasurable pleasure and pride to see how each of them is personally content and professionally successful.

I write this post as a gesture of gratitude to each and every one of them-thank you. Thank you for including that shy, awkward girl into your gang. Thank you for giving me the kind of warmth, love and acceptance that you did. Thank you for teaching me how to stand by friends during their good and bad times. And most of all, thank you for never giving up on me. I am a nerdy weirdo and may do a disappearing act anytime, but please bear in mind, that I truly love  you and will never forget you or what you have done for me.  And while I don’t know if I can be as good a friend as you are, you will always inspire me to try my level best.

A letter to the heart breaker

                                                            

In continuation to my post below, I write another letter. This time it is addressed to the boy that treated my friend abysmally.

Dear Mr I am too great to be wrong,

I won’t begin with the usual formalities, i.e. the “I hope you are doing well” etc-its quite obvious that you are, given the flirtations on your facebook page and my friend’s tears and sleepless nights. I have been forbidden from contacting you and letting you know what I think of your behavior and moral fabric (or complete lack of it) and so I use this platform, hoping the message reaches you loud and clear.

I am not going to berate you or chastise you-I am quite sympathetic towards the disabled, which you are to a great degree. My full consolations lie with you, since it must be so difficult to survive the world without a heart, spine and conscience. After all only a heartless person could discuss marital home rentals with a girl and then tell her six month later that he never loved her. Only someone spineless could let her discover through other sources that he had moved on and was very happy with another girl. And only someone without a conscience could tell a girl he treated atrociously time and again over a ten year period that it was her one sided love that had ruined their friendship.

I have realized that you don’t seem to know the rules of the game called “Love, loyalty and honesty”. And I feel duty bound to guide you, since you have been such an important part of my friend’s life for over a decade. Harmless flirtations are telling a girl she is pretty, and not that you would fight the world to marry her. When you know a girl is hopelessly in love with you and you don’t feel the same way, you don’t keep her as a backup option until you are convinced that she isn’t the one for you. And when a girl is trying desperately to move on and extricate herself from the highly complex web of lies, deceit and pretense that you have spun, you don’t selfishly demand that she treats you as a friend and throw tantrums when she disagrees.

I don’t wish to address you with negative adjectives-the list is far too long and I have very limited time. Besides, we call out the faults of those who accept their faults and are willing to change. Your repetition of the same disgraceful behavior time and again, each time after a profuse apology, has more than proved that you are either too self-deluded to realise that you are wrong  or that you just have a different set of morals and values from the rest of the world. Either way, the blame lies with my friend and my friend alone. She was too naïve, too foolish and too trusting. She deserves to be in the situation that she is in. She deserves to suffer for falling in love stupidly and staying in love ridiculously for so long with someone who proved time and again that he wasn’t worth even the smallest bit of it.

I am really grateful to you that your latest spate of disgusting behavior has finally opened her eyes for good. She maybe in a hell lot of pain now, but she is far stronger than you realise. She may initially do stupid things to prove a point to you and your sycophantic friends, but she will emerge out of this, a finer and braver person.  She will now spend her time over more fruitful activities and more deserving people. Besides, she has a lot to offer to this world and so I am sure she won’t mull over a first world problem like having her heart broken by a jerk, when she could instead help out and serve people suffering from genuine problems and with genuine needs.

I will end this letter by saying that my best wishes lie with you-in all the time that you have existed on this planet, you have left behind such a long trail of agony and anguish that I can’t imagine what will follow once  your sins start catching up with you. You will truly need a lot of wishes to cope.

Casper

A letter to those with a broken heart

I have never made any bones about the fact that I am a romantic and that I love love -I suspect the genesis is the 90s Bollywood movies that I grew up on but anyway, the fact is that love and love stories have always fascinated me. I thrived on matchmaking between friends in my teens and got a major high if the relationship actually clicked.

Unfortunately, one sees only what one wants to see and so I never paid heed to the hundreds of relationships around me that didn’t work out…I am such a firm believer in happy endings that I don’t even watch a movie if it doesn’t end well. And so I lived in denial for virtually most of my life over the fact that sometimes things don’t end the way we want them to..irrespective of how much we put into it, irrespective of how unadulterated our emotions are. God has a way of making us come out of our comfort zone and seeing reality and over the past few years, I have seen some “not so happy endings”, heartbreaks and unpleasantness all around me.

Today I write this to someone who loved a boy very truly and deeply for over a decade, first as a friend and then romantically, only to be led on cruelly, given dreams of marriage, of family, of a future and then, when he had found a better option, to be told that he didnt love her and that they should be friends.

Dear girl whose rose tinted glasses have finally come off,

I realise that you are in tremendous pain and distress right now. I know that you keep questioning what you did wrong and why you have to go through this, since your only fault was to love…blindly and unconditionally. But sometimes we don’t have answers to our questions and we just have to make do with that. Love is a very delicate emotion, especially since it is selfless and pure. We cant understand how someone else can mock it, disrespect it, abuse it. We cant fathom how someone else could so ruthlessly trample over our heart which was filled to the brim with love for them.

But the sooner you accept what has happened, the better it is for you. He never cared for you..he never will care for you..now you need to stop caring too. He treated you in a disgusting way..why are you giving him any sort of importance at all? Respect and trust are far better foundations of any relationship than love ever was and he never considered you worthy of either of those.. is he worth even an iota of your mind-space now? 

 I know that ten years is a long, long time to love someone..but you always knew deep down that he never loved you a fraction of how much you loved him. Remember how he told you that he would need his friends’ approval before committing to you? Remember how he wanted to know about your health conditions before making any lifetime promise (conveniently ignoring  the fact that his health wasnt exactly top notch)?  He has treated you horribly time and again..you were going to come to this state sooner or later.

I am the first to concede that its all much easier said than done. But be brave, be selfish and be strong. Life is going to keep going on regardless, why not just enjoy it? He may not have loved you..but you are blessed with friends and family that care for you and love you. You need to move on for their sake.  You have a tremendous lot going for you..dont succumb to the throes of self pity and depression.

And now the hardest part..dont become bitter, don’t become a disbeliever in love, friendship and goodness. Yes, its very difficult, but believe that this could be a lesson for you never to ill treat someone that comes to you eagerly with emotions so pure and cherish those that love you. Have faith in love, in karma and in goodness…you will find happiness, peace and companionship someday…and that day, you will thank this loser for treating you as he did.

Yours truly,

Casper.