Reaching for the stars

And so I am "old enough". Five turbulent years since I left the familiar corridors of my old school for the great wide world and I am officially old enough to drive, to work, to watch adult movies and many more. All these wonderful freedoms that I used to dream of in my childhood are mine now. 

But not unlike a sequel to a great movie, "adult life" has hardly lived up to expectations. For the uninformed, let me just say that if you imagine a work place, and a home, and then imagine a man moving from one to the other in an organized manner, well then that pictures the greater portion of adult life.

In the great design of my childhood, by now I was to have really determined what I wanted to do with my life. Actually, I was supposed to be way past that; I was to have even made my first million! But then things really don't happen that fast, not if you have the tag "student" eternally attached to you.

Yet it has been such an eventful journey. The half a decade since I've left school (for 5 years does count as half a decade) has been such a changing journey. 

It has been a change of thoughts, clothes, feelings, priorities, heroes, music, food and more or less everything. 

But it's not the change really that seems most strange; it's the way it happened, almost unconsciously. 

I mean I really didn't notice the way my heroes gradually changed from the fictitious to the real. From one perfect hero to a combination of many. It takes time to understand that there really is no one ideal hero. It's a strange reality when you think of all those faultless heroes of our childhood world.

And the way your taste in music changes. It's incredible how the most unbearable songs of yesterday become your favourites of today. It's a funny kind of knowledge you carry around being with younger people and they say, "this music stinks and this music is great". Five or six years from now you know that they will be feeling and saying the reverse.

And isn't it so strange the way, what we talk about changes. It used to never be about the stock exchange or so seriously about the future. And the jokes too have started to change in flavour. I suppose when you know more of the things that people do, you can laugh or cry more depending on the way you look at things. 

And it's so strange how little things suddenly click into place. For me it was things like how memory is directly related to observation and that what people believe is right is mostly just a view point, not fact.

It's strange how money suddenly came into the picture. A strange thing indeed for all of us who didn't even have a100 rupee note in our purses most of the time in our teenage years. And how this little green currency has made us all so different. 

Sometimes all our advancements seem such a paradox to the laws of nature. A rich man of 80 in the developed world can enjoy the bounties of our modern civilization while a poor man of 25 in the 3rd world has to bear its burden. 

I sometimes wonder how I really didn't notice all the pain that people bear, silently and mostly unnecessarily. For all our languages, communication still seems to be the cure to most of our pains.

It's a strange thing really, the strange patterns that are created and recreated: all the strange connections with people and things. The strange way that all these patterns change with time, how the bonds we made slowly loosen. How places change, how people change and how we change. And all this happens so naturally, as if it is the way life flows. And maybe it is. 

And it's strange how the unpredictability of life makes it so seemingly unfair at times, yet at other times almost reasonable. I mean what can a man however good and just do when hit by an earthquake? But then how many times have we heard of the classical case of "people who live by the gun dying by the gun". I suppose we can only lay the plans and do our best, the rest is up to an indescribable phenomenon. Some call it chance others say it's fate. Is it luck, coincidence, karma or accident? I don't know. 

Throw a stone deep into the sky and see it pass miles and miles, or so it seems, to almost reach the stars. Sometimes all that we try to do in one lifetime seems so futile. Just like that stone trying to reach the stars. For no matter how far we reach we must go back one day. 

But then, that one moment within sight of the stars seems to forever draw us towards them, until the time we must go back. Sometimes people reach their stars before that time. And that moment seems to be what we call destiny. Yet for most it is only the journey to the stars that will be theirs. To reach the stars will be for another lifetime.

It's strange yes it's downright strange this feeling, being an adult. I guess this is freedom in a way. But it's not a freedom with the clarity of a dictionary definition. That freedom seems to be something that is not easily granted or taken. 

Strange really, there used to be this little game we used to play. Say any word and put it in a sentence, compare it with the word "free" and make out what is the more central word in the sentence. 

'Free" was the most important word or so I thought until one day a friend said, "love", "Free to love," I said. "Love to be free," said the friend. And that was the last time I used that game to impress anyone!

But there was lesson in it, these things - freedom and love - are of our own definition, and so they must mean different things to different people: one man's freedom or love may be different to another. And that's the strangest thing of all, the way we keep forgetting this modest little truth.