The Unforgettable Desire

I did not want to make this an issue about men and women. Although I do wonder if in many urban relationships, a woman usually wants to pursue her career before settling for marriage. My brother told me about a pair of his friends who were dating but weren’t 'settling'. I asked naively, “why?” He said, “one of them wants to get married, and the other wants to focus on career.” I asked again, “who wants to keep working?” He replied, “who do you think?” “Yeah, the girl”, I said.   That conversation has stayed with me for more than a year now. While career is no easy choice for anyone, is it more important to women? Does the traditional gender role make the urban women have the need to prove themselves outside home? And, because men are expected to work, does marriage becomes an easy choice once they have a job? In one year, I have heard a friend or a friend of friend, every now and then, excuse herself from marriage market because she wants to be someone before being w...

There comes a day when we have to stop using our past as an excuse for who we are in the present. Past is supposed to be accepted. Many a times, it does seem that we have accepted it. It does seem that we have made peace with who we have become because of our past. And, if it is bad we do hope to take charge of what we do now, because we do not want to blame our today for the things we do in future. True that. But the haunting question is, what do we do with our past where we weren’t the protagonists? What if, our past has been entertaining others with its limelight? We were not backstage and we had no role to play apart from being an audience. We laughed when the acts got funny and we cried when grief took over. And, every time we had the stage to ourselves, we thought about what the acts of others left us with. We didn’t have the brain to analyse it. We missed a few shows at times, perhaps, escaped the theatre because we didn’t know how to live just as a mute audience. It i...

Source: www.financialsamurai.com A couple of days after Diwali, a friend called me to talk about his life which included quitting his job and not knowing what to do next. He needed help. And I said, tell me one person who doesn’t these days! The thing is what used to be known as a mid-life crisis has turned into an early life crisis. You do not need to have a steady job you dislike, and that may or may not pay well to feel in your mid-thirties, what's the point of this? You do not need experience to ask yourself, what am I doing with my life, or where is this all going? You do not need to be a grown up thirty something to realise that life doesn’t make any sense and the struggle to go on is way more difficult than imagined. The thing with my generation, the 90’s kids, is that we are a generation of in-betweens. Not surprisingly, we are stuck between the generations that are divided between ‘do what you should do’ and ‘do whatever you want to do’. We are the generation tha...