A heartfelt plea to students today

                                                 

I have been in a very reflective mood lately and one of the things I have been thinking about the most is my education. I was a good student and while that may seem like a good thing, it actually is one of the biggest regrets of my life. When I look back at my school days, I can’t recall friendships, pranks, crushes or boyfriends with the same depth as I can the exams, scheduled tests or results. I never learnt to celebrate a 29/30 in a Sanskrit exam-I only knew how to sulk about not getting full marks. I never learnt how to be a gracious loser and clap for the person who beat me in tests….I only felt a wave of jealousy and humiliation at being beaten. I never realized that in life, what matters is humility in victory and grace in defeat…but God has his own plans and it took me years of insecurity, competitiveness and personal, academic and professional failures to make peace with the fact that one can’t and shouldn’t always be first. Sometimes, being first makes you win the battle, but lose the war.

 

I wish I had let go of this competitive attitude at least during my college years…but old habits die hard. Today when I look back at my college years, I regret not hanging out in the canteen after classes were over, or not participating in more inter-collegiate events. What I regret the most however, is not learning how to deal with failure or rejection. I never let guys I liked know that I liked them because failure wasn’t an option in my life. This stupid mantra in my academic life spilled over to my personal life as well and the cost was huge..probably  something I am paying for even today.

The mania to succeed became even more ridiculous with every passing year and degree. It didn’t help that I chose degrees that required a grueling spirit-The CA degree for example. Even today, years after that torture is over, I feel pangs of sympathy and pain in May and November, the two months when thousands of innocent kids sit down to write those exams. I feel even more sympathy for those who write the exams under the pressures that Professors/CA Parents/their study circle enforces on them-“clear on first attempt”, “get a rank”, “get marks so that you get into the Big 4”…seriously? Ask any one ten years into their qualification if these truly matter. I know for a fact that I was one who succumbed to these fanciful notions and they got me no where. If anything, I wish I had studied to learn accounting and taxation rather than to get marks. That would have stood me in better stead.

And as if CA wasn’t enough to test my patience, I also decided to take the CAT one year. Good lord, that made CA seem like fun. Not because of the academic part, but just because of the ruthless competitiveness of the entrance exam. The way one’s self worth was determined Sunday after Sunday with mock CATS. The way one felt like a complete idiot if one couldn’t solve a question on probability. The way CAT professors treated their “not so smart” students like second class citizens and split them into batches depending on their aptitude level and then only gave respect to the ones who were scoring 95+ percentiles in Mock CATS. The experience scarred me so much that in spite of cracking the CAT, I decided I never wanted to do an MBA in a CAT scored B-School because it would ruin my self esteem and take away whatever little human emotion I was left with.

I know my rant so far makes it seem like I hate these degrees and the education system-I wish to clarify that I don’t. This very education system has produced extremely successful corporate honchos, so there must be something that I am missing. The only reason I write about all this is because I wish to voice a heart felt plea.

Don’t let your education, grades or qualifications determine your self esteem or your life course. I now know tons of highly successful people with very “mediocre” education.  In the big scheme of things, it doesn’t matter if you took multiple attempts to clear your CA final or if you got 60 marks in Economics in TYBCom or a 34 percentile in a Mock CAT.  What matters is the friendships you made and the relationships you fostered. What matters is that you tried out all sorts of things…perhaps you succeeded, perhaps you failed..as long as you learned from the experience. What matters is how self aware and secure you are, what your value system is, what your motivations are….those are the things that will determine your success, in both, your personal and professional life. 

We have only one shot at life, only one childhood and one teenage life. Don’t squander it away in the quest for marks and grades. By all means, give your academics your hundred percent..but because you want to learn and grow and satisfy your intellectual curiosity. Never be afraid to fail, personally or professionally because when you look back, it will be those failures that have made you a better person.  Live your life fully, doing things you love with people you love, and do things for the right reason..else you will be writing a similar post, filled with regret on your blog someday.

The teacher named 2014

As I made my new year resolutions (and broke one within 3 hours of writing it down), I was forced to reflect on how far I had progressed with my 2014 resolutions. The answer was a disappointing and demotivating 0%. I hadn’t managed to fulfil a single resolution. Was 2014 a waste? No. It was probably the year that brought me closer to myself, my fears, hopes, dreams and insecurities. A year that made me pause and think. It was the most difficult year I have had in a long time and was emotionally and physically draining…but has taught me lessons that will stay for life.

It was a year in which I lost a lot that I had formerly held very dear, whether it was the best work project I had ever done, the best colleague I had ever had or some personal relationships that were so close to my heart that I could feel searing pain when they ended. But that was perhaps the biggest learning I had- to let go and move on... to become emotionally detached from my work and from people.

In the solitude and the act of picking up pieces of my broken heart, self-respect and self-esteem, I found myself. I learnt how to stand up for myself and for what I thought was right. I cut off from anyone that made me feel unfairly bad about myself or that didn’t treat me with the respect or love that I deserved.

Was it a bad year then? No..not in the least. I cant remember the last time I have felt emotions to this degree of severity. I cant remember the last time when each month has come with a lesson so great, that it would remain etched in my memory for life. 2014 made me realise who really cared for me. It helped me understand and work towards becoming the person I aspire to be.  It got me to me witness some dear friends settle down, nudged me to do some high impact social work after a long time, ensured that I look after my health and helped me to develop the courage to express myself through this blog.

I have no idea whether I will tick  off  even a single item when 2015 ends…but I do know that I am entering into it wiser, stronger and braver. Wish everyone all the best for 2015! 

A birthday wish

The first memory I have of Cool Cat (the name of my coolest, nicest and craziest friend) is of me sitting in her house in 2^nd grade and making a collage with pictures of wild animals for some school project. Suddenly in the midst of it, she stopped working and started telling me how much she loved Akshay Kumar and started doing some steps from Main Khiladi Tu Anari. That obsession didn’t last too long…unfortunately, the obsession that followed i.e. the one with SRK, last until this date. (I was hopeful that Happy New Year would reduce it, but that hasn’t happened.)

She was hands down the smartest kid in my class at school. When the rest of us poured over our books before exams, she was busy listing the merits of the Irish coffee in Prithvi theatre and yet managed to effortlessly secure top grades.

We became friends only towards the end of school, and it took me a long time to forgive her for ditching me and taking up science in a townie college, instead of studying commerce at a suburban college as we had originally planned. We had this routine-she would call me at 11 am when she woke up (I still get panic attacks when she wakes up early these days) and then we would catch up on every single event in our lives that had taken place in the hours gone by. We would repeat the same thing at night. At that time, there was an Orange (What Vodafone was then known as) 9 to 9 scheme, wherein calls made between 9 pm and 9 am were free, so we would get onto a conference call with a few others and discuss all sorts of nonsense. By that token, and figuratively as well, she was my 5 am friend.

As with everyone else, I cut off from her too during a bad phase in my life. She did something at that time that brings tears into my eyes even to this date. She showed up at my house on one birthday to wish me and when I tried to explain the reason for my disappearance, she told me it didn’t matter-all that mattered was that I became fine. It was that very day that I met her then boy friend, now husband for the first time ever. He is the finest guy I have ever known and I couldn’t have been happier for Cool cat.

I call out all these random instances because, for some reason, I can’t compose a coherent post to do justice to her. (And its not for lack of trying-I have been at it for the last several weeks).   She is one of the most genuine and caring persons I have had the privilege of knowing. She has a fantastic sense of humor and is this complete madcap party person. I have yet to come across someone as large hearted and forgiving as she. She is so completely comfortable in her own skin-its refreshing to know someone like that in today’s world.

I don’t know what I did right to have her put up with me until this date-but I do genuinely hope she stays in my life and remains someone I can look up to and emulate, because she is a role model innumerable ways for me.

Wish you a very happy birthday and all the happiness and love in the world. Please do visit me-I promise on this semi-public forum that I wont ditch you and vanish somewhere!

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.

Boo you, bully!

Disclaimer: I don’t watch Bigg Boss regularly neither do I work for Viacom 18. I just happened to watch an episode last night since I was exhausted and the remote was too far for me to change the channel.

Last night I was watching a random episode of Bigg Boss, where Salman Khan, the host, was berating the house mates for isolating one particular housemate and making him feel miserable over something wrong that he had done. I know that Bigg Boss is definitely not a depiction of real life and it is quite pathetic that I am starting a blog post in this manner, but this particular visual set me thinking about the whole pattern of bullying, groupism and isolation.

It is a myth that bullying and groupism are limited to school. Yes, that’s where they begin. But it carries on throughout life, in different situations. Spiderman’s Uncle Ben may definitely have told him that with great power came great responsibility, but believe me you, in today’s cruel world, more often than not, power, coolness and wealth are used irresponsibly to bully others and make them feel small.

I have been both the bully and the victim, maybe due to Karma, maybe due to circumstances. My biggest regret from my school life is that I never stood up for my timid class mates in spite of knowing how badly they were being treated. I got carried away by the notion of wanting to be cool and accepted and I never did the right thing, in spite of being in an influential situation. And this, when I knew that scars inflicted during one’s teens stay forever and shatter confidence. It is a guilt that weighs me down till this date.

I have also been the victim several times. Whether it is horribly condescending and mean comments made on my nature by supposedly close friends, whom I couldn’t hit back at at due to timidity and lack of confidence, being isolated at times merely due to my life style choices, shyness and need for good grades or being cheated by landlords and flat mates since I was perceived as weak..I have gone through it too.

I have also seen these things happen as a neutral third party. I have seen rock solid groups split into two because two people within the group break up/have a huge fight and everyone else rushes to take sides. Or worse still, everyone sides with the one person, leaving the other friendless overnight. This isn’t even limited to social situations. The timid one at work will always stay the longest and have the most files at his/her desk. The region/ commercial business with a spineless head will always get super aggressive, if not impossible revenue targets to achieve. From Bollywood to the corporate world, cronyism and cliques exist. There is a profession that thrives on popularity and groupism-it is called politics.

Bullies are actually the most insecure people-it’s because they don’t feel good about themselves that they want to pull others down. It’s because people can’t accept themselves that they need the acceptance of the “cool” people. So don’t ever let bullies scar your confidence. If you are have been isolated by your friend circle due to a fight that you had with someone else within the group-you are better off, because if they were your true friends, they would be with you. Yes, if you are wrong, they would tell you that, but they wouldn’t desert you. No one that makes you feel small about yourself is worth having in your life.

Most importantly, stop playing victim and start standing up for yourself. If you don’t stand up for yourself and what you think is right…no one else will. Voicing your opinion or making your hurt known isn’t wrong…it is an essential form of self-preservation.  Remember, the people that have made their mark in this world always stood out from the crowd.