The Unforgettable Desire

In November-December 2017, I was doing an internship at Orient BlackSwan, Hyderabad. As much as I loved the work-environment, I hated the idea of being there from 9.15am to 5.30pm. I hated the idea of restraint. I felt caged although I was completely free within the walls of the office and had unlimited access to coffee. While doing my rounds in all the departments, I got a chance to interview a marketing executive who was in charge of briefing me one afternoon. He seemed friendly, so I asked him about how he ended up at OBS. Earlier I had interviewed one of their cartographers who was kind enough to tell me his journey from civil engineering to cartography. When the marketing executive completed his story, I asked him, ‘if not this job then what would you have done?’ He laughed at my question. He said, ‘I am a Tamil Brahmin. I should want to start my own business, but I am content with this nine to five job, the company takes care of my family, I would never trade this job for anyt...

I have no idea what has become of me. When I was eight years old, I had heard the news of Sushmita Sen adopting a baby girl. I was pretty sure that when I’d be twenty-five, and definitely single, I’d adopt a baby girl too. That was perhaps the very first dream of my life, the very first goal before the idea of being an astronaut or every other fleeting career goal occurred to me. Motherhood wasn’t the goal. The goal was to be successful enough by twenty-five to be responsible for another life single-handedly; and maybe, be an inspiration to some eight-year-old girl who hears about you. Today, I am a twenty-four year-old who is one day old at resigning from a short term job that she took up to feel financially independent in a field related to the only two hardcore relationships in her life – writing and literature. As much as the fear of commitment drives me away from dating people on a long term basis, it also drove me away from jobs that included actual writing and literature ...

I have been juggling many life choices in my mind. I took a month off from Hyderabad. I went home. Before I left, I was in an internship that changed my way of looking at things. I realized, either I am not willing to accept ‘reality’ or I am not meant for jobs. I cried many times in my office washroom. I was frustrated that I could not read and write in that period of time. When it was over, I went home - away from the environment I usually live in, away from the people I usually interact with. I went home to discover myself. In the one month I spent at home, I read five books. I did not write anything worth publishing on my blog. I ended up with a few drafts nonetheless. What I liked the most at home was, the way my parents looked at my reading. Every time my mother talked about my reading habits, I could sense pride in her voice. I challenged my father at reading books. I had a good time. Every other day, I used to tell them about a strength or weakness of mine that I discover...

Books, like babies, are adorable. The moment you hold either of them, you feel a kind of happiness you had never felt before. It’s satisfying but also scary. You are grateful for it, but at the same time, there is a constant nagging and fear in your head to take care of it, lest it is harmed. Books and babies have another thing in common apart from being bundles of joy. No one talks of how they come into existence. As far as babies are concerned, talking about their inception is a social taboo. And, even if the procedure that takes place after the inception is explained in details in Biology books of Class VII, Class X, and Class XII, the sterile words hardly make sense in the truest sense to a hopeless uninterested student like me. I am still unsure of what exactly happens once the egg is fertilized, zygotes probably formed, and something with fallopian tubes or maybe not. Like I mentioned, hopelessly uninterested. But, to save my soul, I now know that babies aren’t thrown down ...