So there’s all of maybe six months.

Discount those bumboo – up- large intestine days before the exam. Discount those days when you’ve to fill up application forms for placements, or when you’ve got to scrub up and return home before your folks take a bus and worriedly end up at your room.
There should be another set of stuff that should be factored into the above list of exceptions…but rite now me too buzzed to want to list them. Or pretend that they matter to me.

But there’s all of 6 months till I’ve got to wash up and act like some mgmt lackey sucking up to some other mgmt lackey who ended up there 3 years before I did. Till I wash up sober, clean shaved, deo & tie in place, meeting deadlines, aligning performance goals with company strategies, asking other people below me to act responsibly and in the interests of the company I only currently work for.

6 months to reclaim a boyhood I’ve never really let go of. To play football and LAN games.To pick up tennis and baddy. To read fiction without feeling guilty. To pacing the hostel corridor in shorts and little else, theorizing on life or the next blog post …while Knopfler strums away in the room. To rip into people with little thought of the consequences. To plunge into anything I find a liking to, inappropriate or not, useful or not, harmful or not.

6 months to reclaim a collegehood I never let myself have. To actually go chase a girl and to want to take it someplace emotionally significant. To not care about beer guts or hangovers. To pick up a bike and car driving license. To pick up the guitar. To go to Goa. To travel. With the girl I successfully hounded just now. To cement some friendships I’ve left ambiguous. To have more beer by the campus lake, by the seaside rocks outside my engg college, in a studio apartment in Mahm, or another flat in Lokhandwala.

6 months left now to prep myself for what’s next. To figure out the big picture about what I really want from my job, and the subsequent career line that might just give it to me. To trade off between academic interests, bloated salaries and 5 day weeks or onsite chances. To maybe work on something of noteworthy value that I can show for all these years of education. To figure out what I’m about…what she should be about…where life goes from here. Whether I’d want to keep coasting or settle down. To figure out my first big purchase. And stuff I’m not going to write about here.

I’ve always been this grandmaster at posing questions like these to myself. It’s what I do when pacing that corridor at 4 am. The only reassuring ring to the whole business is that there will be 6 months of beer. Cheers.

Song of the moment

Fortunate Son ; Credence Clearwater Revival