Does life have a Pause button?

I managed to survive without the internet for exactly 90 hours. This is a record in itself. The fact that I need to remain connected with the world outside without leaving my home is of great importance at least for the next 5 days. So in the last 90 hours I had a lot to ponder over.

1. Why do the dullest books ever get the Booker Prize? Why is it that Sidharth Dhanvant Sanghvi’s book didn’t receive the same praise as other Indian authors? Is it because he was being an Indian telling a story about Indians in India without making them out to be black magic believing, spell casting, utterly stupidly behaving people? Or is it because there is plenty of the desi vernacular scattered in his story? Or is it because the story is very normal, something that everybody has seen happening around them, something that is so normal that such normalness is universal. Or is it because the story is set in the 1920’s and such normalness was not expected out of Indians back then? Je ne sais pas!

2. My best friends and I have fought several times over the years and people actually wonder why we are still friends :).We always manage to meet up at least 4 times a year and exchange stories. We don’t have anything in common anymore except that we once went to the same school but now we are all in different fields and that hasn’t changed a thing between us. We can still talk about anything to each other. But I have the toughest time talking to my college classmates of five years who I will invariably run into during the course of my work. Even smiling at them is strangely a task.

3. I did tread over what the future might hold for me. I couldn’t paint myself a pretty picture because all my friends are getting married at a rate where I have to question them as to whether they fear they will not find another partner if they let this one pass. People I once heard say they would never go for arranged marriages are going for arranged marriages. Mere hours spent with a guy/girl are enough to decide as to whether you can spend the rest of your life with them? The very idea spooks me. But by some miracle they usually seem to work just fine. [At least on the surface.]

4. Why do some of the nicest people I know end up having the toughest lives?

5. Why do people who are dying to tell something to someone, tell everybody else that except the one they should actually be telling it to?

6. How is it that I don’t know even a single person who is actually enjoying their job today?

7. I finally figured the whole concept of “Pursuit of Happiness”. Its not that one ends up pursuing happiness all their life. It just so happens that people are happy and do get to enjoy seconds of their happiness but there is always a force in the universe that tries to balance all the emotions hence as soon as you counter happiness universe will sprinkle some of its unhappiness so that you start pursuing yappyness again…ecch Sorry I guess I could have shortened the whole thing and said “Murphy’s Law” instead.

8. Why do parents like to compare their children's progress with that of their friends? Fine I understood the thrill that parents got when we were just school going kids comparing scores scored in different subjects. But why now? We are all doing our own thing and parents are still exchanging notes on their children’s lives. We kids discuss all our evil deeds behind our parent's backs. Random acquaintances of my parents that I run into know what I have been up to and that is not really a nice thing from my perspective. The interrogation that follows is not nice either because I know they are only asking me questions to tally what ever my parents might have told them with what I am telling them. I need to figure out a way to stop this.

9. How pretty black and fawn color Labrador puppies would look.

In my cloud gazing, ceiling staring bliss, with Fenny always keeping me company, we discussed a lot of other things which I will not be blogging about. Enjoying simple pleasures while I can :)