I don't like..

It’s been ages I felt like a real human. It’s been ages I have been genuinely happy. Something’s wrong. Something doesn’t fit in somewhere. Scored better in CAT than I realistically hoped for, got into an institute of my own choice, got back with my girl, had a lot of beer, smoked up some really neat stuff, played a lot of scrabble after ages, got a nice new place, wasted a lot of money that I never earned at the first place and did almost everything I would ideally put on my list of things-I-would-like-to-do.

But something still doesn’t feel right. Something feels too streamlined and rigid for my liking. I am turning into someone I have despised all my unconscious years. And who that is, I have no clue. And the worst part was, the choice had always been mine. And I always made the right one. But I don’t like being right. I don’t like sitting in a classroom and trying to genuinely make sense out of whatever ‘mr.phd+5 other degrees’ is trying to preach. I don’t like drinking beer with a nice group of people who have a very good idea about their direction in life or would at least like to. I don’t like smoking up in a group of people who like smoking up and listening to Pink Floyd. I don’t like me smoking and I don’t like the idea of quitting because I-care-for-my-lungs. Given a chance, I would actually like to quit these habits. And honestly, the reason wouldn’t be anything other than my health. But I just need a better reason for quitting. And I don’t like either looking for it or not finding it. I don’t like nodding my head in HR classes instead of screaming my lungs out that I don’t fucking care about employee satisfaction, self motivation and personality types. The human mind is far more complex than an irritating HR model and I don’t like it when people don’t realize it.

But worse, I don’t like not knowing what I like. May be I would just like to have a brewing cup of coffee with an old friend I haven’t met in ages and whom I never really liked much back then. Or i would like to actually have the time to watch all the mindfuck movies I have downloaded recently and keep trying to make sense out of them. I would even like going away to some old European village and live on bakery food for the rest of life. That’s a little too fat fetched I guess. But I would definitely like to stay up all night looking at the ceiling and sleeping through the day. I would like to make myself a plate of dry & over- boiled magi noodles and eat it with my bare hands. That one is not too tough but the problem is that the idea never seems appetizing enough when I actually enter the kitchen.

Also, I would like not feeling nostalgic about the past. I would like time to undo whatever it has done to us in the last 10-12 years. And that would include humming and dancing to ‘Tu cheez badi hai mast mast’, being awed by The Terminator, cheering to cricketers like Mark Waugh, Chris Cairns, Nathan Astle, Murray Goodwin, Andy Campbell, Ajay Jadeja, Saeed Anwar, Sourav Ganguly, Neil Johnson etc. It may seem like an odd choice of names but these were actually the players I adored back then. Nathan Astle, the most. And I would like ipods being replaced with walkmans, play-stations with those TV videogames that had Mario, Contra, Bomberman and Pacman in them. I would like CD’s being replaced with audio cassettes and I would like airfares to go up again. I would like to play a four player carom game on my own and pretend it’s a ‘house competition’ and I am the star player from my house. And of course my house would lose few of those occasional insignificant matches because the contest needs to seem fair and realistic. I would like to persuade my mom to buy me a TinTin comic and finally be content borrowing it from someone else because it’s too costly for a comic. And I would like reading anything written by Enid Blyton with a speed and concentration I could never muster for anything else and then scribble her signature in the last page of every notebook I have. I would want my younger cousins to know the kind of fun we had back at their age but I would never want to sound like a preachy grandpa complaining about changing times and rising prices. Mostly because preachy grandpas have betel nut juices dripping out their lips and it has never been a pretty sight.

Given none of this, I would just settle for a bottle of beer and a relaxing weekend. And may be some time to try and write something creative and may be mildly humorous. Not this, Definitely not this.