Category: Notes

When bad luck hits, it hits real bad. Life is going through the most severe testing times that I ever had. But the interesting thing is that you grow stronger after every test though you would initially think that it would make you weaker. It also helps you to pause a bit, look at the life and people around you and actually SEE them. It is a great lesson by itself.

My mom had a massive heart attack at home in the last week. She had it twice in just 4 days at the hospital and I thought I would lose her. But all the prayers seem to be answered. She had an angioplasty done and has been moved from the ICCU to a room in the hospital and I am waiting to bring her back home. I believe that prayers and wishes of people can do wonders and I can see that now. I have also learned that Faith, Family and Friends are what a person needs to keep moving forward in life.

I thank all my friends who provided me the emotional support through phone, SMS, emails and in person. It was a great relief. I still need your prayers for my mom though. I couldn’t tell or write to many of my friends because I have been real busy at hospital up to this time and couldn’t leave a word. The only thought I had in mind was to get my mother back. But some of them came over to the hospital. I thank Dr. T V Manikandan (Cardiologist) for taking good care of my mom. He is a very nice person to talk to and was patient to explain everything to us. I also want to thank my friends Ajith and Sijo. Ajith and his friend Manoj personally looked after my mom very well in the hospital ICU and kept updating me every moment of her health. Sijo provided a no-question-asked, un-conditional support when it was asked for and needed the most.

Thank God for friends and family!

This is one of the most bored/depressing weekends. I don’t know if it is the weather today or the recent happenings in my life or a sum of all these that makes me feel blank today. I felt like crying and I thought twice before I just wrote “I felt like crying”. Shouldn’t I have put up a Macho face or a smiley face here instead of writing that?

Why is it so that when you are depressed you do not think about all the blessings that you have but what you do not have? Why is it so that you don’t thank God for the present and worry about the future? Why is it so that you want to hold your pain to yourself and not share it even with your close ones?

But I am thankful for all the wonderful people out there. Friends who SMSed me, called me, emailed me and said “you can talk to me if you feel like it“. Some of them are people whom I never met in my life. I’m also thankful to those who did not call, as I had written to them not to call because I did not feel like talking back then. I am also thankful to my mother who understood me and supported me throughout the recent events.

I have lost much focus on these days. I have lost my day dreams of the future and I need to come back to it. So now I am sitting up here and jotting down things just to remind myself of the things that I think I should do, or I think I want to do, I need to do or things that I really want to do. This is a self-notice post, so it may not be interesting to you at all.

• I want to do more with music. I want to do a music album. Composed and sung by myself. I want to give it my best shot. And as I remain an amateur singer, I would probably name it “The Bathroom Album“. 🙂
• I want to do another album where I would only compose songs and get my friends and other music bloggers to sing the songs in it.
• I want to get a job that would let me come home at the end of every workday. I envy people who can go home on every evening after the day’s work. But I think I should consider many other factors before I decide on this.
• I think I should learn how to be happy with the present situation (on all fronts – personal and professional) while not being stuck with it for a long time.
• I think I should stop feeling too much homesick.
• In a few years’ time, I want to stop working for companies and do business of my own. I want to start a web services company. I want to start it by myself and then slowly extend it to a small sized company of 10-20 over the years and keep it growing.
• I think I need to invest some more of my free time to achieve the above. I think I need to expand freelancing a bit more and get a steady flow of clients. Work on a bit hectic night schedules for a better future.
• I want to live and work in Bangalore for a couple of years.
• I want to live and work in a foreign country for a few months or a couple of years.
• I want to try different professions than IT, but need to check if it pays enough to pay my bills.
• I want to become a Radio Jockey.
• I want to get off Internet, job and take a very long vacation. I want to go on a trip, visit many places in India like Delhi, Bombay, Shimla, Kolkota, Haridwar, Jaipur etc. I might visit some of these places in the near future. I aso want to visit Africa, America, France, Germany, Russia, England and Switzerland (I have no particular reason why I mentioned these places).
• I want to fall in love. I should not force myself to it and it should happen naturally, even without me knowing that it is happening.
• I need to prioritize the above mentioned things and read it everyday and do a fact check on a half-yearly and yearly basis.

And I feel so much relieved after writing this! 🙂

There are times when you would have to take a decision – a harsh decision that you know if taken would hurt all the people close to you and even yourself. And if not taken, it would hurt yourself and the other party so much more. What’s worse is that it was my fault (a big fault at that) that lead to this decision.

So now I have to tell you this. I am an asshole. I recognize it and admit it. I deserve so much pain. A lot more than what I feel now.

PS: That new phase of life I wrote about will not happen now.

I know that the frequency of posts in this blog for the past week has been very low. I also know that it has been some time since I have posted a song here. The reason is that I am preparing myself to enter a new phase of life, which seems a lot exicting and even more terrifying when I come to think of it. I am talking about marriage. 🙂

Being an individualistic person (not that I am very proud of it), I always needed a lot of private space in my life which I never cared to share with anybody, not even close friends. You can tell that by the way I live now; living alone in a guest house room, without sharing the space. I do not regret living that way, because this private space has given me a lot of time and energy to do creative things. It gives me a lot of freedom.

And in a few weeks time, somebody is coming in to that space. Someone whom I am only beginning to know. And then will come a whole new phase of life. Part of it is exciting, of course. Part of it though, quite terrifying. But as the days go past, and after talking to friends and taking tips from them, I have a feeling that everything would work out well gradually, even though I know that I will have to change/compromise/adjust in certain areas of life. One thing that I am certain of is that I am not going to kill the free bird that nests deep in my soul, but okay to control it whenever needed.

Learning about the other person who is going to partner with you is an interesting thing. You even learn a couple of things about yourself in that process. Which makes you look at yourself and wonder if you knew yourself well enough. But the whole preparation for the ceremony and arranging every material thing needed for it (including money) is a hectic process. I don’t know if there is any other phase in life which seems so exciting and boring at the same time.

So right now, life is busy. I focus more on freelancing when I come back to my room after office hours. It helps me to save a few bucks, using which I could buy a Zune player last week and going to buy a good external sound card for my home recordings. So it is good, though sometimes freelancing drives me crazy with lack of good sleeping hours.

That’s a lot of ranting for now. Before I stop, I promise that I will try to be more frequent and will try to post a couple of songs before the big day. And to you I would request to wish me luck. 🙂

I was feeling low for the past few days and was thinking about it. I always thought that I am capable of making it to the top in most of the things that I do. I have been trying hard to make it and along the way I met talented people, learnt new things and I began to feel too low. I felt low because I realized that I am mediocre in everything I do – Music, profession, career and life in general (only exception is that I think I’m doing my best to my parents) – no matter how hard I try to come over it, I remain mediocre. Sometimes the odds are just against me. I also blow up everything in the same level of trying hard; always try to control myself but mostly in vain. Not that I am feeling bad about the latter because it makes me feel human.

I used to take pride in myself, but now I feel that it is this mediocrity that I was being proud of. And what a shame it is! I thought I was excellent when I was doing just average. I look at the talented and successful people and see that they have crossed their breaking point at a very young age, because they were all original and excelled in what they did. Look at me. I’m 29 and most of my dream plans remain just dreams. And that’s nobody else’s fault.

These days, I have such bad dreams of going back to the old days when I was a nobody (not that I am a real somebody now, but am talking about when I was a real nobody). I wake up and look around and realize that I am still here, in the comparatively new phase of life.

All these make me realize now that I was afraid to lose. I was scared of failure. Because I thought that I was destined for better things. I thought I was special. But I am not. And I think I should admit it first and then try to push the limits. From today onwards, I will do just that.

Meanwhile, I happened to read this blog post by Peter Bregman of Harvard Business Publishing (shared in Twitter by @GuyKawasaki) and it was so encouraging. The article is titled “Why You Need to Fail“. Read it if you’re feeling low too. 🙂

Michael Jordan, arguably the world’s best basketball player, has a growth mindset. Most successful people do. In high school he was cut from the basketball team but that obviously didn’t discourage him: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career, I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game wining shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

If you have a growth mindset, then you use your failures to improve. If you have a fixed mindset, you may never fail, but neither do you learn or grow.

Last weekend, I was on the regular weekend train trip to back home in Thrissur. The train journey has been made hell for the passengers ever since the side-middle berths were introduced. Sometimes the middle berth is not allotted and sometimes it is. So you could see people wandering around looking for the actual berth number compared to what has been printed on their tickets. As the railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav got more famous for making Railways one of the money making machinery in the country, the passengers have to travel in the thickly packed compartments, not even being able to move a little on their berths.

Some people even had to cripple themselves to fit in the berth, sharing the body heat of the co-passengers, sweating most of the times because the fans would not work sometimes. You point it out to the TTE and he would try using his pen to rotate the fan and if it’s failed he would walk on, giving a notion that it is not his job to make the fans work. So the lesson here is that you cannot hold the railway minister and his ministry accountable or responsible for the torture they give us for paying them and making them rich.

But train journeys still give some glimpses of real life, like the journey in the last weekend for example. I saw this family who came to see-off their mother. The mother is an old lady, who wore a red cotton saree which suited her perfectly well. The family accompanied was her son and daughter-in-law. They made sure that their mother got the right berth and placed their luggage under the seat. The old lady seemed to be comfortable with traveling, an indication that she is probably a frequent traveler.

“Amma, let me introduce you to Unni.” The son who seemed to be in his middle age introduced another man. “Unni was my class mate in the school. He is also getting down at Ottappalam station.”

The mother smiled at Unni. “Which compartment are you in?” She asked her son’s friend.

“I’m just a couple of coaches away. Call me if you need any help“, Unni was all smiles. “Why do you have to travel so frequently? You could stay with your son here.”

“ I tell her that all the time“, the son was happy that he got support from the friend. “She stays one month at Trivandrum and another at home in Ottappalam”.

“That must be really tiresome!“, Unni said.

“Yes, it is. But I want to do this as long as I can. Can’t stay away from the hometown for long.” The old woman said as she smiled.

I was amazed at that last sentence, but I could understand it so well because I share the same thought about home and hometown. I feel homesick on almost all week days. I miss going home everyday in the evening after a day’s work. The fact that I am single and not married doesn’t reduce the homesickness in any way. But I know that I am considerably lucky compared to some of my other friends who cannot come home on every weekend. Some of them are working in far away places in India and some outside the country. But on every Friday, I look forward to going home, spending time with my mother and meeting my local friends. It gives me a great level of emotional comfort. Every Sunday evening, when I wait for the train, I think of shifting my job to a place closer to home, which would let me come home everyday or meet the faces that I have been familiar with every since my childhood.

But the very next moment, I look at some of my friends who are easily adaptable to the situations in life. I look at them and I look at myself. That leaves me with total disappointment. There is a part of me who want to set out myself free. Who wants to work in different places, meet different people and experience life. I wished if I was less of a family man and more of an individualistic person who did not have much commitments with family in this stage of life. But then I realize the responsibilities and commitments I have in my family life and that holds me back. When I travel on weekends, I see many people making regular weekend trips to home. I think those weekend trips help them refresh themselves during the weekend and get back to work recharged.

So is this homesickness good or bad? With the kind of emotional support system that we have been getting from family and close friends at home and hometown, shouldn’t we give some of it back to them? By giving them the support (most importantly the physical presence) at the times they need it the most? Like in the case of our parents? But is it helping us, the individual, in anyway of growing up in life?

Why are we so emotional about this word, Home?