Good Old Summer Holidays!

These are times, when you thoroughly start missing school days. School days in April and May were synonymous with eat-sleep-play indoors-eat-sleep-play outdoors-tv-sleep. This schedule was practised day in and day out till we were exhausted. When parents used to come back tired, we laughed at them for not being able to enjoy life and being too worried about their workplace and managing naughty kids. I as a kid often wondered why are my parents not interested in coming home quickly to watch the Sharjah cricket matches that would end by 7 pm( 93-97).Why would they not be as enthusiastic in playing with us kids? so many questions then, but now, the answers seem to fall in place as tables have turned. I know how tiring and sapping work can be, especially if you have a troublesome boss(who’s boss is a God anyway?).On top of that is the hour long commuting jostling for space to ply on the roads and when you reach home, there are a 100 things that need your attention like a leaking ceiling, bad tubelight and a plethora of house hold troubles.

10-15 years back, I never cringed playing cricket in the sun. My Mantra then was to put a cap on and field near a friend’s home, from where I could have regular doses of water during my playing stints and these days, I moan, groan and throw up hands if I need to do an errand in the hot Chennai sun.

I never was so worried about sweating then. Today when I go for my morning walks, I have all my attention on my walkman, not getting any sweat seepage from my body or worse....head for the AC straight after a journey in the sun. Those days, in my Adayar apartment(Chennai), taking a breather meant sitting on the corridor, talking endlessly with friends, playing carrom and trump cards and never complaining about “how hot it was”.

Even I have to play cricket on my computer, I look at my worried face refelecting on my laptop, which seems to say"Do you really want to play, when you have a statistics case study, A 180 pages of pre reading and an emperical project to get started?" In short, I have started to question indulgence and measure indulgence in terms of opportunity cost.

I want to break free, play cricket everyday, plan strategies to beat the opponent, watch cricket matches in the morning and night, while doting on cricketing statistics provided by The Sportstar. At evenings, I would love to sit and feel the breeze from the besant nagar beach, even as neighbours sit down and advise me on the benefits of attending some math classes during the holidays,while my mind wanders on going on a nice summer vacation. That’s exactly what I did every year from 1990 to 1997 after which life was never the same, as I shifted places, friends shifted places and life became lifeless.

All these thoughts flood my mind as I see my kid cousin sisters who’ve gone to my grandma’s place to spend some time.

I long for going there, but to be frank, I have a lot of other things to do at B-school that need my immediate attention, and if I didn’t end up doing that, the guilt within of indulging would eat me. Its confusing to decide what to choose, but right now I hope I am making the right choice, as I cant complain too much. The B school is basically a conduit where your inputs decide your output, so I am making sure that I use the resources well enough for a year. But….even as I see family life and socialising slipping away, I guess I need to figure out a way to revive that too, as I hardly meet any old acquaintance or cousins.

I some how get the feeling that ambitions in life are more so like the proverbial wave that tries to outdo each wave that hits the shores. After a wave disperses on the shore, it comes back with renewed attempts at bettering the distance to which it can wet the sands slowly but steadily. Every attempt of ours makes us speculate deeply and we try harder at every attempt to grow better. As a wave, apart from hitting the shores, the other waves hitting the other end of the shores also needs to be looked so as to see if any improvement can happen. In the process of hitting the shore, the waves must make some time out to see the wonderful life that exists below it in the depths of the sea. That’s exactly synonymous to our life, where we sometimes fail to see beneath whats visible. In fact sitting and typing this is a good break from longer reading hours. Its not that I am complaining about life in a B school, but just the notion that I get into a nice rhythm that has time for everything, so that one doesn’t get to miss out on this lovely thing called life.

Even as I type this, I am thinking of a 5 pm quick dash to my grandma’s place sparing 3 hours in the evening, which would have to be compensated in other ways.