The court is adjourned...

Sid and I last spoke 10 years back.

I don't think we had a fight or anything. He just turned from my "best-friend" to someone I once knew. Of course, it didn't happen overnight. The only thing that came between us were...well...I guess...years. Back then, all we two cared about was the game of 7-tiles in the evenings or the odd trip to the nearby kebab shop for romali roti and kebabs that we used to devour on Sunday evenings. And back then, it cost just 10 Rupees! I wonder apart from the prices, what changed so much that we grew so apart over the years.

I think I just said it. We grew apart. The operative word being GREW! It surely did not happen overnight. From having no preferences or opinions, we started having a different take on the same things. We started hanging around with different people and at different places. And then a time came when there remained nothing common. Not even common subjects to exchange the odd pleasantries on. Nothing at all.

We all tend to have our own comfort zones. Places, people, things et al. we can relate to. Sometimes we do befriend those who're so completely different but then what we end up sharing isn't too much. It’s usually just the one or two odd things that brought us together. We tend to get too protective, if I may use that word, about these little comfort zones. As we age, the people that we let in start getting fewer and fewer. Till a time comes when we just stop letting anymore in. The doors are simply shut.

But it’s another thing that really got me thinking. It is our diminishing level of tolerance for people who choose not to go our way or at least endorse in spirit if not in letter, how we see things. They form the "others"...

Recently, a good friend of mine introduced me to her to-be-husband. Someone her parents had chosen for her. The chap seemed pretty nice. Very ordinary looking, but pleasant. He was from a prestigious B-School and that was on top of an engineering degree from a REC. He spoke well and dressed tastefully too. However, there was one thing that kept pricking me...it was his dry and dull demeanor. He never seemed to get excited about anything. All his sentences had a calm rather dead tone to them. I am sure he'd keep my dear friend happy, treat her like a princess but I am really doubtful if he'd be able to make her laugh. Something that I know for sure my friend loves doing. Anyway...

Did you see what happened here? While I was explaining the guy to you, whatever I said was HOW I SAW IT. It was all my interpretation of the person. So how can I say that she made a wrong choice? What if having a person you know would stand by you, come what may, is more important than the wise ones someone once she loved could crack? What if being pampered for life by someone coz' he'd be thinking he got a "better deal"...was more important for her. And there are a million more such things.

People are different. It’s their way of looking at the same thing that makes them different more than anything else. Also, just because I think going to a good engineering college makes someone better doesn't mean others will think so too. What is important is that I must learn to accept the choice the other person has made.

Hence, from this moment on my personal court stands adjourned...indefinitely. No more judgments.

Amen!

Exit options...

There are two things anyone can make out of the card game of FLASH:
a) The earlier you EXIT the lesser is the damage to your wallet!
b) More often than not, its not the one with the "highest" combination of cards that wins, rather it's the last man standing or in simpler words, the one who decides NOT to quit.

Allright...enough about cards.

There is something that bothers me whenever I talk to any of my peers about career/jobs and stuff. It's the idea of EXIT OPTIONS. There always always always (this was not a typo) HAVE to be excellent exit options of the next career move. In a nutshell, we are talking about the "Plan - B" even before a day at the new job. To put it more bluntly, the WAY OUT is an important criteria for deciding whether to get in or not in the fist place!

A phone call from an old friend the other day left me slightly confused. She had just started seeing a guy and really excited about the whole thing. The real good part, in her words, was the fact that they have already decided to not make it ugly if down the line things don't go the desired way. This was a good thing she said, as so many people around today are in such messed up relationships struggling to keep things together for no apparent reason. So as per her, in her new relationship there was not "extra pressure" to make this work at any and every cost, after all they had already talked about the EXIT OPTIONS. "Awesome ain't it?", she exclaimed at the end of the conversation. "Yeah...really...", was all I could muster...

What has really got me confused is the fact that all this while I was under the impression that the true fun of the thing lies in getting through rough the patches together and somewhere down the line, the whole experience of sticking through it all gets people closer. Similarly, I wonder why most of us (me included) aspire to do it all...I mean the "whole works" that we learned at our colleges in our first year at our jobs! When it's clearly proven through empirical studies that 6/10 MBA grads switch jobs within the first 11 months of their joining! How on earth do you expect the company to entrust the employee with the kind of responsibility we so often dream of in the first few months? Fact is...I myself fall prey to such thoughts quite often...

Of course, there are many cases when throwing in the towel is the only sensible thing to do. After all, who would want to live with an abusive husband? But somehow I am getting the feel that QUITTING is beginning to be the "in thing" these days. Quitting on anything and any person seems to be the norm rather than to toil through the rut and earn the pot of gold at the end of rainbow. This ain't easy though...No way! But I faintly remember the number of times I was scolded, at times "fixed" by my folks for something wrong that I'd do no matter how much they tried to correct me... till one day when I stopped doing that again... Would have been easy for them to give up too I guess but they didn't. Same for many of my friends who've all this while put up with me on my bad days, teachers who could have let me be another failure of the education system...and so on...

The point is QUITTING was never difficult. But my old fashioned self still believes I'd hang on a little bit longer, just may be the storm eases out later. Life is not a card game. Packing up your hand early to cut the losses isn't the wisest move always. The stakes are high, no doubt about that but it's sometimes more worthy to loose a well-fought battle then to bail out at the first sign of rough weather...