Adios amigos

It is time to say good bye to all those people with whom I have had the chance to be with over the last 2 years… but I really don’t want to. I want this to continue… I mean I did hate the acads part and all those war over the grades and things, but I actually don’t mind doing it now. I am not usually sentimental… in fact I never am sentimental… well even if I do get senti at times it is often mistaken for humor… so well this post might actually be unsentimentalistic but I hope I do manage to convey what I feel irrespective of whether it makes you laugh or wanna belt me with rotten tomatoes…

Well since the first para sets the tone of my emotional state, let me confess the condition I am in for those who cannot read beyond the lines… I am confused… I really don’t know what I want to do… my last 3 months of useless existence (or so it seemed) without the hectic pace of the MBA up to trim 4 has me really wanting to get out of this place… friends turn backstabbers when you want them around… they go home or go into hibernation… just when you need them the most. Revenge was the first thing on the agenda. I should leave too… my family is waiting (ah-ummm on second thought they must have really forgotten their eldest child as it has been 9 long years… but still I got a place to go… )

But wait on second thoughts, do I really want to leave? Yeah of course the point of progress and call of duty and last but not the least the concept of having a regular money supply is enticing. But then we would all become money making zombies… no personal life… no time with friends… not much socializing… no chill out… or worse still our friends would become money making zombies and have no time for you… again that begins the vicious cycle of revenge as explained in the previous para. On hindsight, the reason I quit my job to do an MBA was because I was losing my marbles thanks to the latter situation. But with an MBA our responsibilities are expected to increase and so time spent with friends is gonna rapidly decrease… so if you can’t beat them, join them – become a zombie yourself.

I cannot imagine a life outside of the protected enclosure I have been through the last 2 years. Of course this was how I felt during my engineering graduation, but then at that time I did not run into this place seeking protection from the hostile world. Then it was like a warm place called paradise giving you the power of money to give you the freedom to live a life you wanted. But now I am going back, totally unsure if I am actually equipped for the war as I am portrayed to be. At least during my engineering my lack of experience helped me to be motivated for the adventure that lay outside. But now that I know what lies outside, I am not sure I want to go there again…

But then the last 2 years have taught me to be confident and face things as they come. So ideally I am better equipped than the people I would meet out there for they don’t know that beneath the exterior armor of the MBA, there is actually no protection, but I am stronger because I know that fact. Or maybe I am wrong in my self evaluation, but you know information is wealth, and wrong information is better preparedness and when preparedness meets opportunity it is converted into luck… you get the equation right?

Over the last 3 months that have been tantalizingly devoid of any work and have given me a lot of time to recuperate and reflect (read: sleep and day dream), I have actually begun to hate it… the long periods of dormancy is actually killing me… and having had a taste of the work life, I am not sure why I should expect otherwise here too… at least here I knew that there were others like me who would readily ping for movies and at work I am all alone. Well at least everybody else is cocooned into their own lives to respond to a movie request… and how can we watch a movie in as formal a setting as a workplace… a classroom is fine… in fact the excuse could even be that we are using the movie as a case study.

But I also hated the hectic MBA schedule of so many assignments quizzes and worst of all boring profs and classes… but actually what really makes me want to go back to those torture chambers again is the fact that I want to see the others too in the same boat. I cannot imagine life without IP messages… all those mindless MCs and chatting with your neighbors… well I don’t know if I would even have a neighbor who would know to use a good messenger let alone exploit the features of IP messenger… yeah of course I might get a good internet connection and be able to download unlimited movies and software from some remote person’s hard disk some million miles away, but I might not get the movie that my friends have seen last nite over the small grey window… how will I ever get those warnings and death threats for simple harmless movies like K3G and salaam-e-ishq and Jaaneman…

But actually there is no reason ever for even those friends of yours to actually keep you updated on trivial things in life as the movie they watched last nite… there is no reason for the not so close friends to even remember you even. The few seconds we get to meet on the streets would be lost in the exchange of pleasantries that are common while here… before signing off with a “keep in touch da” without actually exchanging details on how to and moving on… yeah of course, we have the mailing groups which would probably have a grand revival now… but then considering our busy schedules we have to show to our masters, how often would we do a check on those places…

It is all in the mind you might say again… it is just a mental block and you can keep in touch if you want to… and then that argument brings us to the beginning of the post, why all these elaborate good byes… why sign on the t-shirts all those lovey dovey messages… why write all those “god bless you and may you have a great future ahead” in the year book if you are going share my future anyways by keeping in constant touch…

Of course it may not be completely possible to eliminate the cyclic redundancies out here but then life will have to move on… there is no point in living in the past and we got the future to watch out for… but then the past is what we are… now again the confusion begins… I am back to paragraph 1…