PP reminded me its been 5 days since my last post. Yes, it has been a frustrating week. Snippets of my diary rearranged below to look like a blog-post. I've been preoccupied with the following -

 

1. Economical meltdown - The entire economic cycle is right in front of my eyes. I am not a witness of the phenomenon but a victim of it. Individuals are cringing to spend money, organizations are not recruiting and the jackpots of one era (read: Finance and IT) are the latest wells of misery.

 

I am a part of the rut. I am educated but not educated enough. I quit a well paying job with a giant organization at the wrong timing. I had not anticipated the melt down. I now work for a start-up and I have not received salary in the last 2 months. I have long bills which are being foot by my parents, who themselves live an almost hand-to-mouth existence. (An honest public sector class 1 officer has perks which do not turn into cash and a salary which has not been revised in the last 8 years. My mother is a home-maker. )

 

2. Slumdog Millionaire - People were hysteric. Shobha De and the likes wrote posts everywhere about the movie. Friends on facebook were swearing by the movie. Internationally, people have another half-baked story on Indian poverty to talk about in their social gatherings. I downloaded it on Torrent (added to piracy) and watched the movie.

 

I thought it was just ok. Love overplayed for a 'slumdog.' In those harsh realities what does a kid know of love? Never mind, he still chases the girl to a happy ending. (extremely happy ending considering IIM grads of my country are almost out of job and a slumdog is a millionaire!)

 

Spit on my face all ye Europeans and Australians. I am an Indian. I need Danny Boyle and Gregory David Roberts  to tell me that Dharavi is bad life.

 

3. www.intent.com and spirituality - I was going through intent.com for a case study in my organization. I have always been spiritually inclined (I do not read self-help books, in case you were wondering.) and so the website caught my attention. I was mesmerized by the content to start with and emailed a whole bunch of friends about it. Ritually, this morning I was reading intents there and someone said - Only perfection exists. There is no imperfection.

 

I thought to myself, when you write self-help books and cash on the millions of depressed people or make sub standard movies, you are in a position to easily look away from this world's imperfections. Watching slumdog millionaire and dubbing it the movie of the year is stupid if you do not know that world is full of slumdogs who will never ever get a full meal, let alone become millionaires. Life is far from perfect, I am not speaking out of frustration but out of conviction.

 

4. Growing older and other insecurities related with it - Less than a month to growing a little more older. I am starting to get crushed by the number game. I am trying damn hard to be the right sister, daughter, friend etc. and I am missing myself more than ever before. I started 2009 being broke and I will start the 24th year of my life being broke too. Friends are settling down and I m becoming restless since I don't want to settle down but want to feel more secure.  blah blah blah.

 

(pre-midlife crisis.)