the Pause button

A post i read here reminded me of something that happened tome and kind of scarred my psyche. I’m narrating it now but NO names will betaken. I will be as vague as possible in order to save my completely hypocritical ass from the label of libel and moral judgement. Sorry. The disclaimer to this post is that I'm a major hypocrite.

It was towards the end of my MBA sometime. We had a projectto do. I rushed to this woman’s room. The door was closed but slightly ajar. Kindof dark I guess. Thought she was taking rest.

I knocked and opened. Remember – knocked, and opened. NOT knocked,waited for an answer and opened. Simply KNOCKED and OPENED. I thought, hey I’veknown her for 2 years, and I’m a woman.

Sometimes you wish you had practice sessions for certainscenes in your life (Seinfeld advocated something like this once).

Sometimes you wish you had taken the second road in thatfork you came across in life, instead of what you were taking.

Sometimes you wish someone had warned you earlier.

Sometimes you wish you had company.

Sometimes you wish you were shot dead right there and then.

And in that one moment, all those sometimeses convergedcruelly on me, at the moment when I did not WAIT for an answer after knocking.

What I saw involved two people. How many men, I will not say.How many women, I will not say. How many each, I will not say. All I’ll say isthat what I saw should not have been seen. At least, those two should not haveknown I had walked into the seen scene.

I ran back to my room, shut the door and screamed to me poorroomie. She literally held me and asked me what happened. All I could blubberwas a string of incoherent words sprinkled with the names of the two people I saw,and she got it I guess.

I lived in fear for almost an hour, worrying sick about howthe hell I would confront those two individuals. And confront, one of them did.Told me that it was a moment of weakness. Yeahh righttt!!!! As if I was thejudge sitting there waiting to pronounce a death sentence.

I mean, I actually thought those people would blackmail meinto shutting up, torture me endlessly, and make me answer a simple question –why couldn’t you knock before entering? I was so scared for my life I was readyto hide myself in the bathroom till God promised me I would never come acrossthese two again, and here this person is trying to come clean????

Anyway, I’ve always been careful from then on. Whew.

Currently Reading: starting a Jeffery Archer thing - Prisoner At Birth

"Submerging your ego to be half of a pair."

- Jonathan Kellerman, "The Survival Of The Fittest" 

today, i would have jumped. the pain was too much to bear. what was more painful was that i'd closed all my outlets. friends...i have plenty of them, well-meaning, who'd take time out for me...but i can't keep calling up my friends and sob every week. i can't tell certain other people because it would mean certain boundaries would be crossed. which leaves me with no choice but to cry alone. where do i cry alone? certainly not at home, where unwarranted sarcasm is doled out in the garb of concern. where else?

ah, how much i longed to be all alone on earth, then. ok not really, but if i wrote what i really wanted... well...i think i'd rue the moment i wrote that, forever.

but soon afterwards, something miraculous brought back all my confidence in my relationship.

only to make me feel more and more alone.

how do you deal with a world in which you feel you have/are screwing up multiple lives? how do u deal with a life in which u think you have figured out things, but the syllabus has completely changed when you were busy growing up? how do you deal with life when the self-esteem you never had all these years you so painstakingly build up over the past one year, only to have it pummelled from different sides?

aah... weeping alone feels delicious.

maybe, when i wasn't looking, i really died. because surely, this is hell - the place i was destined to go to. 

Current Mood: do i have to spell it out?
Current Music: silence

 

Is this life? The helplessness. The incessant tears. The injusticeof not being delivered a permanent solution except that of ending it all.

 

No, I’m not over the edge. I traveled there but was neverbrave enough to jump the cliff. Because I know I’d have to come back and battleit all over again, maybe without help.

 

Yes, there was a time. I was foolish and incredibly immature.The kind of person who really needed to grow up and see life. I like to believethat I’m now less foolish than before. And somehow, I foolishly believe thatthat entitles me to fewer thrashings from life than before.

 

Well, I think life does not care how well-equipped you are Iguess. It’s like buying new armour only to find out that the enemy is ten stepsahead.

 

Current Mood: "What do I do?"
Currently Reading: Survival Of The Fittest - by Jonathan Kellerman

Current Mood: questioning, questioning, questioning
Current Music: something on Discovery channel

I've had confusing experiences with honesty. Childhood taught me that honesty is THE best policy. Mahatma Gandhi's copying incident being rubbed in early was among the first few


 matchsticks to light this naive fire of correctness in me.

Yeah, all throughout junior college and engineering. A couple of adventurous detours apart, yours truly was known to stick to the rules. Out of fear of creating the wrong impression, mostly. And if a rule was bent, there was hell to pay for, because the mind was like an examination hall. Internal examiner with external-exam-level questions and criteria. Mostly, I would barely pass. Ah, the cookie was on its way to crumbling, and I was too naive to see it coming.

No one in school scoffs at you if you're a good girl, but there's something about adolescence and the late teens that is widely known as peer pressure, that is known to be the cause of much sin in the world. I'd like to know where the hell the first peer gets his pressure from - if all of us were indeed born and brought up clean, how does it even start?

So now, peer pressure and honesty. No, I wasn't really a victim then. Not a full-fledged victim, at least - mind you, i was still at the stage where i would look down upon dishonesty and condemn it like i was Honesty's mother who discovered her son was being ragged in school. I was not at the stage where I would look down upon honesty as though it was an embarrassing tear on the cover of my sofa-set that chose to become suddenly noticeable when some 'important' friends were coming. That's coming, don't worry.

From living in a mental fairy-land where there was no choice but to be 'ethical' (the vagueness of whose definition i shall soon discuss), it was very tough to suddenly come into contact with the real world where it's technically NOT possible for everyone to be lie-free at the same time.

So yes, I'd done my share of, lying, if you must - a little leeway in projects, much help in the laboratory record books, ALL the help in class homework. Then came MBA (very rightly reduced to the cliche - Master Of Bad Activities). The cookie was crumbling like hell. This may sound cheesy but I remember actually weeping at the amount of 'cheating' I was doing - fudging projects and assignments. Then, my first job gave me the opportunity to witness a lot of legalized cheating, ranting about which is beyond my scope now for several reasons.

The primary reason that leads us to take shortcuts is obvious - the ROI. You invest X and get Y, but isn't it better to invest X-5 and get Y? Which, in several cases, is a fallacy. We IMAGINE that we've found a shortcut, when the reality is that the actual path of X doesn't hurt that much. It sometimes even gives us long term benefits. Like when you desist from copying homework and do it yourself. The benefits here are obvious, but they're the kind you'll realize after you've become a boss or a parent :)

Yes, babudom and lack of time makes us take shortcuts for passports, driving licenses, and lots lots more.

But you know, it's not so bad after all. I found this out pretty late in life, but it's really okay to stand in queues and get your work done normally. You'll at least have a conscience to rant at things in public forums and jaagore.com and Facebook.

There are several kinds of ethical people among us. Parameters differ. A family which gets scandalized at any mention of 'copying' in an exam, may not mind fudging documents and stuff to get its son a US visa. A person who wouldn't make up sales figures won't mind faking petrol bills to get that extra Rs. 15,000 off his company. A parent who teaches children the virtues of Mahatma Gandhi or Lord Buddha wouldn't wince at bribing the policeman who comes home to verify the family's passports.

Ethics and honesty are things that have always led to much much conflict in my mind. It's not surprising to see very very few people who a) have clear principles of what's right and what's not correct, b) are not ashamed of having those principles, and c) are even less ashamed of adhering to them. This, without having someone breathing down their neck.

And ultimately, it's the real world. Where romances last only in books. Yeah, some of them lasted, during my grandfather's time. :)