A phenomenon I call Swe..

There is a maxim I'd like to quote before I start to say anything, by a certain 6 year old philosophical genius. It goes like, "There is an inverse relation between between how good a thing is for you and how much fun it really is". If I tell you that it took me 22 years and a 2 year long encounter with a certain person I should call my best friend (at the risk of sounding cliched) to actually realise this, maybe you'll get an idea about how slow a learner I really am. I know this blog is a bolt out of the blue, coming at a time which doesn't make sense, but I know S will understand it. Everytime I meet too many people I think I cannot take any longer, I think of her and I know that it is alright, that maybe you cant turn on sanity like a faucet and most people's tanks have gone dry (or may be had nothing to back up in the first place) and I feel sorrier than angry, something I learnt from her, even though she may never realise she taught me this.

The first time I met her, I was out of home for the first time in my entire life and quite frankly s*** scared and lost. And there she was, this hyper active, enthu female who sat 4 seats from me during our training at our first job. I cant say I liked her much, she did come across as a brat; she had the cheek to ask a guy we barely knew if there was a good place for a drink, since we were new to the city. And thanks to my couth upbringing in a typical South Indian Brahmin family where it was a sin to even think these things (where you have illustrious cousins, aunts, uncles doing their Ph. D's from IITs and all that crap, where all you are taught is how life is all about your academics and you are looked down upon if you are this regular software engineer at some Indian firm) I pretty much drew up an image of her, albeit not a good one, and decided to avoid her like plague. It took me a month to change my mind - maybe change would be the wrong word here, it took me a month to realise I was completely wrong, and it is one of the best things I have come to realise.

S and I have lived together for a good 18 months, and there is nothing we did better than procrastination. How terrible our lives/jobs were, how we ought to quit and do just about anything, maybe even remain jobless for sometime, anything but actually work. It never occured to us that most of the time, this was THE ONLY thing we actually did, remain depressed and never work. I know we were not in the best of our moods, but honestly, there was nothing we enjoyed better than cribbing to each other over all night philisophical sessions. There was another thing we made records of sorts at, shopping and watching movies. If I were to tell anyone that I spent faster in a week than I earned in a month, that I paid most of my credit card bills in EMIs and I always loaned money from our more illustrious roomies (Note: this does not include S ), I'd at best be called insane. But not by S, she was my soulmate, she understood, because it is precisely what she did. She has a very simple philosophy for this, if I dont spend now when I am single and dont have any responsibilities, I will never be able to realise how good (or bad maybe, but not bad really) it really is. She hates the word saving, I learnt quickly how right she was. It has been revelation knowing her - if I know what it is to let go all the pressure I always assumed upon myself, to know it is ok to feel crappy at times and do really stupid things as an outlet, I owe it to her. And there is no end to the memories we have made, thanks to endless instances when we felt that way.

Things like coming home after 2 everyday and waking up bleary eyed to go to work, hitching a ride from a near drunk guy only to realise that he could'nt even find the ignition and bolting out of his car realising he was drunk, meeting drunk guy 2 in front of Blore Central and talking to him for half an hour about how he was Gandhi and I was Putali Bai, having the spunk to brave all odds and sit through endless movies that can at best be termed nightmares by lesser mortals, taking walking on BG road at 3 in the night because of temporary insomnia and then running home when we realised we were being followed, sleeping and missing our bus from Tirupati to Bangalore, then getting duped of all the money because of our mad scramble for the next one.. its endless.

Above everything I said so far, I think S gave me a thing I call a perspective, its because of her that I think I realised that there is a depth to every person rather than the narrow dimensions of morality I judged a person by before S happened. She made me realise how right and wrong can be subjective and all the fun in life is nothing to be apologetic about, if anything I view them as proud achievements. And it is to those 2 years that I owe years of my maturity. It is to her. I wont belittle what we share by saying thanks, because I know what she'll say, wtf - I dont like to hear such crap. Here's a toast to the ultimate camaradie I share :)