We’re again in a new year, and just like some of the previous years, where I have tried to maintain some of my resolutions that I believed can be fulfiled, my list for this year is full, and attempts have started to finish off some of the checklist of tasks that I have.
For a start, one of them is reading. I know I sound repitative, but back in my school days, when I loved reading, I never thought that this habit of mine will die down one day. School days are full of memories where I wanted to rush back home and finish the Enid Blytons, Sherlocks, Secret-7s and Feludas. Today, that is no more the case. The urge, for some reason is long gone. It’s not a reader’s block mind you. It’s worse than that – and I never thought in my teens that this gap of some 3-4 years in reading, will in turn make this old habit of mine all the more hard to pick up again. I distinctly remember, rushing back at 9AM on a Sunday morning from tution, to sit down, start the book of some 300 odd pages, and by afternoon, I was well done with it. I remeber distinctly finishing ‘Pather Panchali’ even before school was just into 2-3 months with it. I distinctly remeber my dad scolding me to stop engulping Agatha Christie just because I was so addicted to it, that I forgot my preparation of the terminal exams that were knocking on my door. In the last 3 years, I barely can say that I have read more than 3 books. I feel bad and sad due to this, and this year will be the year, wherein I shall give it the biggest shot to revive my old habbit of reading books, the habit that I loved so much. In fact, that was something that I could boast of in front of a lot of friends, tht I read and loved to read, when so many of them didn’t.
Wherein, in the middle of all these years, I developed a liking for Indian History, freedom struggle and the like. I wanted to read up on the available resources, whichever I could find to know about the struggle (which, I believe, is no less than an epic like Mahabharata or Gita anyways), and in the same vein of thoughts I read ‘An Indian Struggle’ by Subhas Chandra Bose. Not that I didn’t try to read after that, I started with a wonderful book called ‘Cosmos’, and even though I am halfway through it, I left it to start another book on Relativity Theory, by Albert Einstein. And then, now, I am into ‘The Elegant Universe’, another masterpiece for those, who’d like to take a glimpse into theoretical Physics, which includes tidbits of String theory. Physics is now my new interest, and I am already increasing my wishlist of books to read on this topic. All that I wish for, is that, like History, it does not just fade away.
My life, ever since I wrote here, has gone through quite a few changes. I am trying my hand at business, alongside with my full time job, planning trips with my family, and also purchased a new flat in Bangalore. Parallely, I am starting to think how my life would look like 20 years later. It’s something that I’d like to plan for in advance. Not like my twenties, where life just threw a bunch of unexpected surprises, I’d not like my fifties to be like life in wavy waters. I plan to retire around that time, God willing, and retire from active social and family life altogether. Even when I was young, and not much of a thoughtful person, I often pondered about our ancient life stages, where they had detailed and planned out every phase of an active human being’s life, starting from education, to a family man, settling down with your wife and kids, and finally fading into oblivion. That ‘fading away’ is something that I crave for happening when I reach that phase of my life. No disturbances, no more nuisance and dealing with people (when did I like dealing with people anyways 😛 ). Solitude is what I’ll desire in my last life. And honestly, even at 28, I don’t want a long life, where I’d have to spend decades living that solitary life. 5-10 years should be enough, wherein, I’ll retrospect on the fifty years of my life, what went wrong, and what could have been better. I pray to God to grant me that opportunity at the earliest. And I want to die, a content, and learned human being. Please, is that too much to ask for?