I became victim with my long hairs and some of my colleagues tried their best hair dressing skills to get me a pony tail.. unfortunately pony tail is still quite far.. Had a profound discussion on being Indian and my casanova life style (yes.. they believe that I have a girlfriend in each and every town..I wish I could have been that lucky..). They termed me enigma, mystery..difficult to understand and what not.. 

In between I got some calls from friend who are girl..and that added fresh stock of fuel to fire. The discussion went on. I had nothing to contribute in that high spirited discussion.. I was the topic being discussed. 

Finally after having seen around 20 Kingfisher can moving from freezer to floor and 5 colleagues from being as to the point and terse as they are talking to Interactive Voice Response system to being as verbose as Rakhi Sawant in a reality show, I decide to move out of the party.. Another weekend and another plan of doing some work on weekend ruined. 

I spent three weeks (though not very disciplined but quite regular) in trying to make myself equipped for the test. Took sometime off and went to Auroville for a week to devote all the time to GRE. The mock tests did me in this time as well. I never scored less than 1500 on any of the mock tests. And was more than satisfied with my preparation. But the score in the real test was a shocker. I screwed it. 

It took me sometime to get to that reality. While I was trying to recover from that shock, life gave me many surprises. Shocks and shocks. And I was completely defenseless with no coping strategy. 

The Auroville stay is also something which is responsible for something very significant in my life. Something had a deep impact on my core. For good or for bad I do not know, but something kicked me hard. The experience had a profound impact on the way I look at things and react to certain triggers. 

Post Auroville, I am coming to terms with many things. Relationships, priorities, perception, integrity and morality.. and what not. The more I think about things, the more complicated they become. I am not afraid of complexity or challenge of overcoming the complexity and find a simple pattern in all this. What I am afraid of that in any complex system, the connection are too many and any effort towards making this system simple results in unintended but unavoidable impact on many components. These impacts are usually not uniformly positive for all components. 

For many I am inconsistent, mercurial and  lack predictability and hence probably a not person to rely upon. Maybe they are right, I never made an effort to be consistent. But, at least they can predict that I am unpredictable. Being unpredictable is not bad at all. I think predictability causes more pain than uncertainty. Uncertainty causes worry but predictability causes pain. If you ask me why I am talking about this.. the answer is there are many things which do not go together in my life, yet they exist. And Auroville was a place where I did go through all these thoughts in detail. The answer is elusive. But the mind to some extent ready to accept all the possibilities and all the alternatives.

 

It is 4.32 AM and I am not able to sleep. Just lost in a never ending chain of thoughts that made me travel in directions I could have not imagined. The bad thing about a fertile mind is that it makes your life hell, though the good thing is that it can give you an illusion of solution to any problem on the basis unbeatable logic. Probably that is what has happened, I am yet to get a solution but there are certain meretricious alternative to the solution. Yeah, I am sure these are not the solutions.

I am going to sleep, probably will wake up after 6-7 hours to again find myself in the same situation. And the vicious cycle will continue.

I have been defining most of the relationships in my life, but the most difficult one are the one I have with myself. I am not sure how to treat myself. What to expect out of myself, or is there a need to expect anything? I am pushing myself towards an aimless and inane life. There are certain things I hold very close to my core, and do not want to lose them. 

I have been shopping for quite sometime and never realize the price of individual items as used to notice the total bill and have never been in habit of checking my bills in detail. Today evening I realized how prices have changed.  Yes, after a long time I went to buy a few things from a normal old general store and paid in the old traditional manner..yes did not swipe the card .. paid in cash. So now milk is Rs. 24 / liter and mutton is Rs. 450/kg. My mind goes back sometime years when I used to grocery and general shopping for my family. The prices have gone more than 3-4 times, in just a span of 6-7 years.  Today's shopping gave me some really startling questions on many things. First, I am really really bad shopper, I do not check the prices and whether I have been billed properly. I do not realize how much money I spent on things which I could have easily avoided. And the most important one, how many people can afford these things ?