Category: Musings

Six years after quietly walking in, she quietly walked out. No doubts. No questions. No lingering regrets. Just the hope that you left their world a tiny bit better than you found it.

“There’s a great line by Groucho Marx,” I said. “‘She’s so in love with me she doesn’t know anything. That’s why she is in love with me.’”

There are a lot of romantic stories about entrepreneurship which have sprung up over the last decade. Things have started working out for people. The success stories keep you pumped up in hope of that elusive finish line. Despite everything, most entrepreneurs believe, and very strongly, that eventually things will work out. What no one prepares you for is what will happen in the meantime.

A lot of people ask me why I went to Ramlila Maidan.

Why was I there?

There were more than enough reasons not to. There were questions and doubts about what will come out of the whole show. There were questions about whether this was the right way of doing things. There were questions about people’s morality. There were questions about people’s intelligence and whether they even knew what they were doing. There were doomsday predictions of the country going down the dark path towards complete anarchy.

How many mistakes is a man allowed in a lifetime? I think I may have made one more.

Every time I look at the mirror, I see an unknown face. Eyes closed. Hands wrung. Wrinkles on its forehead. Look of dejection in the lines running down from his lips to his chin.

The clouds are coming

The ground turning dark

I have but few places to hide

My shelter tattered

Have you ever felt fear? Real fear. The kind that rises up from the base of your spine. The kind that leaves a chill all across your skin. The kind that is accompanied by the realization that this could be the moment of reckoning. The kind that you cannot do anything about.

Sometimes the best laid plans can go to waste.

I was to leave for Ladakh a couple of weeks back. Everything was set. The saddlebags were strewn in the open. The bike was leaking oil and the brakes weren’t working. I had just quit my job and had no assets or savings to speak of. I had people breathing down my neck about all and sundry items of my life. It was perfect. Until the fat doctor with a penchant for being hours late came into the picture and spoiled it. She detected dengue in my blood stream.

I used to feel like a dog on the edge of a highway. Fascinated by the quickly passing by cars and buses which always seemed to know where they were headed, hurrying quickly to the destinations they were so sure they needed to reach. I was so unlike them. I stood at the edge of the road not knowing even which direction to venture out into. Thoughts of possible death by getting crushed were not what stopped my steps. Neither the fear that I had no idea which side lay what. It was this undefined vagueness in my eyes which made everything very blurry – like an old, grainy sepia coloured film running in slow motion. I was lost in the view. I wasn’t in a hurry. I didn’t have anywhere to go. I had no destination. I just wanted to enjoy the view.

It got very cold as the overhead blower kept spewing a chilly breeze despite it being no more than 10 degrees outside. And I let it go on. The breeze forced my eyes shut which had no sleep in them despite this being the last flight out of Delhi on a Sunday night. My eyes began to float.