Another year passed by and life is going on. Every year I make resolutions and promises and in the end, it all ends up at …. awaarapan ….banjaarapan. Yesterday night, I was all alone and awake till six in the morning, thinking about all the up and downs of year that’s about to pass. Professionally, it was an exciting year. I got my first promotion at Microsoft, got an IT Pro Award, visited Australia and Thailand to help Microsoft customers, got to learn various new technologies and more importantly, I lost the tag of ‘rookie’. However, on the personal front, it was a year of lot of surprises and emotions. I realized I am deeply in love with the girl I have been talking for a year. I travelled over thousand miles to meet her and spend two most beautiful days of my life. After meeting her, I realized that she deserves a better guy than me, hence, didn’t get the strength to propose my love towards her. Later she said me that, she waited for me to speak out about it but I didn’t. All was fine till then…and suddenly everything started going worse. So worst that…. we haven’t spoken in last thirty days. During all those thirty days, every conversation that I had, every activity that I did, directly or indirectly was leading towards her. At about six in the morning, tired with all the memories, I went to bed hoping for a changed tomorrow.
Woke up from deep sleep at sound of Azaan… the call for afternoon prayer. What a lovely dream it was… she was in the dream. We both were seated in an auditorium… watching something… maybe it was a science lecture… or maybe a movie. By the way, there was no darkness around…so it wasn’t a movie theatre. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. I was next to her and that matters to me. After the Salat, I prayed to God about several changes in life and made few wishes. I don’t know what happened by evening, everything appeared so wrong. I had one of my worse nervous breakdowns. My brain went totally heated up and it was going insane. I tried my level best to calm down but it wasn’t controllable. It was as if, I wanted to hit people, bang my head to the walls, break the things around, shout like a wild animal and I can’t describe all the other insane ideas my brain was throwing up. After an hour, I felt, if I stay some more time at my house, I would do something really terrible… I immediately left home…and started walking on the streets. I had no idea where I was going… I was just walking like a mad person. Throughout the distance, there were images flashing all over my eyes. An hour later, I came to my senses. I settled at a nearby hotel, ordered a cup of tea… and tried to calm myself down.
All these years, my life has been just like that mad walk. No idea where I am going…and I am just going without realizing where I will end up. Of course, there were ambitions, hopes and goals… but there wasn’t a clear direction. All throughout my student life, I wanted to be a scientist, a scientist who is purely interested in advancement of human knowledge. I prayed to God for a good job with decent salary so that I can support my research work. And my prayers were fulfilled, I landed up at Microsoft. I should have got back to research but instead I fell in love with a girl. Of course, falling in love with a girl is nothing wrong but the manner in which I went about it was absolutely wrong. She was Shia Muslim and her parents would never agree for Sunni-Shia marriage. I was made to think and it was all me… the stupid mind which always thinks… non-stop. I tried to play the game of chess from both sides. The simplest solution that appeared before me was, if I become a big guy like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein… obviously, her parents wouldn’t ask whether I am Shia or Sunni… they would be more than happy to give their daughter’s hand. And of course, if I become scientist like that, my parents would be more than happy to accept any girl that I choose. I know, the whole idea sounds crazy to lot of you, it still sounds like a brilliant idea to me. Soon, the sole ambition of life became, ‘do a huge scientific discovery, get fame, convince my/her parents, win her heart and then marry her’.
And after two years of effort, I landed up at a road-side hotel with a heated up brain (actually, sipping the Irani chai at that hotel made me forget for a while that I have just walked five kilometers like a mad dog)… forget about being like Newton or Einstein, all the research papers I wrote were rejected by journals…. and the girl is not even talking with me. How wrong can I go in life! And today, I have lost both the belongings closest to my heart… science and her. I have disrespected science… discoveries don’t happen just like that… and certainly not to the people who want to do it for the sake of something else than scientific knowledge. And love is not won by achieving fame. Both science and love demand sacrifices. I ordered the second cup of tea… the first cup was really tasty.
So, there I was… the guy who lost his love and his passion. My father once told me, ‘you cannot change the mistakes you already committed but you can change the future by not committing them again’. Basically, the question before me was… what am I supposed to do now? For whatever I am, I truly love her and I don’t want to lose her. She might get married to someone else in another six-seven months….and damn… I have not much time left. On the flip side, after she gets married to someone else… I can completely dedicate my life to science. But that won’t be a life… it will be a like a hopeless machine trying to compute a problem. Love and passionate sex is much needed in life. So… that puts me into even difficult situation. Had I used brain for science and heart for love, I would have had both by now. I did the opposite and lost both of them. Damn, I was again thinking about the mistakes which already happened. I need a solution to change the future.
It was about ten in the evening, I received a call from home. Thought of taking an auto back home…can’t walk five kilometers again but then… while walking I would get more time to think. So, decided to reach home by walk. Very bad decision again… there was no energy left for brain to process …it was all consumed by mechanical energy needed for walking.
At about 2 AM, I realized, I don’t have to convince people about my love. If it is meant to be, things will fall in place and it will work out. And if it isn’t meant to be… no matter what I do… it won’t work out. It sounded really cool then. I wrote her an email. But you know, after sending her the email, I re-read it… it all sounded so hypothetical. What a loser I am! Given that I was not able to do anything… I am escaping by using the concept of fate. She will get really confused when she will read it. Damn… I have always been like that. Confusing people…or maybe… after reading all this…you all would think ‘I am confused’. Actually, the truth is somewhere in between. Anyhow, let me focus… I have to come up with a strategy… the strategy to win my love and get my dedication back to science… it’s going to be a long night!
