To think that at some point in life (not too long back, probably five years at the most) I used to write emails with “dat” and “coz” sprayed all over it strikes as nothing short of, well, extreme silliness for me. It is amusing at the best and embarrassing at the worst; the things we have done and the things we continue to do! Ah well, probably the only good thing about life in all of it is that it continues to be unpredictable. Wonder what else would I look back and laugh at some more years down the line? Not that there’s been much time to sit and introspect, but that’s another story altogether.
The past weeks have been very hectic, in fact dizzyingly so. It is not fun to serve the cricket crazy fans in the country on a high traffic website on a day when Murphy’s Law works much better than any service that runs on your servers. That apart, I managed to go for a crazy gig last Sunday (grainy, awful videos here and here), bought two new books (Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain) and a bunch of new music (INXS, Billy Joel, Talvin Singh and Beautiful South). Ergo, I have been doing quite well other than for missing out on ‘My-Time’, which mostly denotes spending time by yourself precisely in the way you want to spend it.
Eco, as usual (okay, I never liked Baudolino much), is an absolute pleasure to read and you can always sell me any book which is about trying to figure out who you really are, so it is all the more sweeter when it is written by one of my favourite authors. I have sampled only a couple of pages of Soul Mountain since I am not too fond of reading more than one book, time constraints notwithstanding, at the same time, but the tiny nibble I got was stunningly delicious. Of the music acquisition, INXS, Billy Joel and Beautiful South are typical ‘best of’ compilations, while Talvin’s HA is refreshingly different from his normal work and I’ve been listening to ‘The Beat Goes On’ almost non-stop ever since.
It is hard to believe that I’ve done over a year in the new job. The work is not exactly risk-free and doing well is rewarded with even higher targets to achieve, which I actually do enjoy. I think the dreams of doing something on my own is now firmly in the back burner and I do wonder if it will ever be back on top of the priority list. The idea right now is to work really hard for another four years and take a call whether I can slow things down or not. The four year plan depends a lot on optimising resources and generally living better, which I have been able to do little by little, but I still have a long way to go.
p.s: If you have not seen DailyLit by now and if you are one of us lazy readers, you really should. All they are missing is a PDF link.