Goodbye 29 : July 1

So a couple of days (months maybe...) back I had started (or intended to start?) a series of posts where I was saying hello to my 29 year old self. Alas the happenings to life compelled me to now follow through that intention. Today is the first day of my last month of being 29, I have 24 more days to go.  And so I decided it's alright if I couldn't say hello to 29 properly i will goodbye to it doing what i love - writing about random unrelated things.


The twenties have been cute. I was talking to someone and I said - I didn't have a very exciting college life - i went to girls only college in South Delhi - now don't get me wrong , it wasn't not fun because it was a girls college, for me it wasn't fun because it was in Delhi. I think I would have been a lot more open-minded and my parents (read : mom) would've been a little bit more liberal had i been in a city like Mumbai or Bangalore or Kolkata. Delhi didn't have the best reputation of being the safest place for women. And sadly, 10/11 years down the line - nothing has changed - it might have even gotten worse. Anyway, so my life was restricted to home-college-home. Maybe sometimes i would bunk classes to go catch a movie with a friend or hang out post college for Chai or a meal but i didn't do anything super crazy. I was pretty boring. Someone called me boring today in fact - so well, looks like I'm similar to Delhi in that unchanging manner huh? The best thing about college was me meeting my one of my closest friends in life - Sakshi. She and i survived college because we had each other i think. And even today - although we aren't in touch ALL DAY EVERYDAY, we speak more than once a week at least and she is one of the few people who can tell me the honest truth and I won't cry or try to refute it. Her intentions are pure and she would definitely figure in my list of top five people I love and top five people who love me unconditionally. My soulmate-ish relationship with Adithya also grew stronger - if there is one thing msn did right it was to ignite this friendship with him, because although we had met in school and knew each other from there, we only connected over msn chat when I was in Delhi and he was in Michigan - sharing our mutual journeys, often moving parallel, and our mutual one-sided love stories. Adithya and I have always been, and will always be the "more loving one" in our relationships. And being that kind of a person means you often end up being  hurt a lot more than not. Again I don't think I could have survived any of those without adithya by my side. Other than a deep love for economics, the only other things my college education gave me was that by the end of three years, I was qualified enough to get a job.


Now, while the above paragraph was the snapshot of the two years before I entered by twenties, the next few are the real deal and they are all about my job, the people I met there, the things I did the men i loved, the men who loved me and the man I almost married - i mean I'll touch upon these briefly, this is not a tell-all blogpost.

I joined this company when I was 19, I joined them on July 14 and celebrated my 20th birthday on July 25th in 2008. So this month is significant not only because I am turning 30 but because  I am also (some would say finally) leaving this gorgeous organisation. The last ten years have been amazing - I took a random crazy decision to join the office in Hyderabad and not Delhi. Why I did that and why my parents thought that was an ok decision is beyond me even today. My parents at the time lived in Delhi, so it would technically make perfect sense for me to stay at home, save some of that meagre salary they were giving me and be in a comfortable-ish place instead of going away to this other location. Even today, when mom and i speak, and try and remember what prompted that decision of mine, we are at a loss. Although, she thinks she told me to go for it and I agreed - this often comes up in conversation when I express my gratitude about everything life has given me in my twenties. Moms love saying "I told you so" in good and (especially) bad situations.

So I packed my bags and moved away, my father came to drop to me in Hyderabad and after that neither my dad or mom visited for the next 5 years. Now i realise that this is pretty normal in most other countries and cultures. But in India, even today, allowing daughters to go (or choose to go) far away and then not look them up, is being pretty liberal. I might belong to the 2% of the populace where this is acceptable and in fact encouraged (which are two very different things).  Adapting to new locales and new people was never tough for me - if you are an army child you are by default instilled with this quality of being malleable - in a good sense. So I took to Hyderabad well and she treated me well too. I met lovely people, I took some lovely trips, money was less but life was good - money or the lack of it was never an issue. I lived my actual "college" life here in Hyderabad those first five years - i learnt about men and relationships and fell in love twice, and almost married the second guy I loved. I also realised what it is that brings me joy at work and had the opportunity to interview for the role and get through. I still remember it was early morning and I got a call on my mobile - it was a US number, I pick it up and answer in a groggy-ish voice and a very senior executive in the company congratulates me on having passed the interviews and said I had the role. I was stunned, I didn't expect to. I have an issue with believing that I deserve good things in life - I'm working on it and the twenties have been an amazing learning curve and a teacher in that aspect.

So, it took me a while to believe it but when it hit me (some ten minutes later) I was jumping with joy, had a shower and got ready for work and opened my ipod and got into the cab to get to work and this song was playing : aaj kal zindagi and I felt like i was literally walking on a cloud. I remember how dreamy and perfect the scenery the we passed in the cab looked. This is it. Life was good. I remember messaging my closest friend, and he told all of our other friends and it was like an achievement for all of us - me getting that role was a celebration for us all. I loved that role, and continued with it for all these years, I changed teams but landed the same role in each one. And then in a span of two-three months the best and worst things happened to me. I was the most hurt I had ever been in my entire life, and then i fell in love. He still is most probably the kindest man I have fallen for and the only case where he has been the more loving one. And I messed it up, I never thought one could fall out of love if they had found the one. But either he wasn't the one or that falling out of love is a possibility. Or both. I moved to Gurgaon for a 6 month assignment and our relationship started developing cracks. We both applied to move to Singapore for a job, i got through he didn't and he went to Sydney instead. We went from bad to worse and with a final blow, that light was blown out.