Duniya hi saali khilaaf sasuri!! :P

So I am happily singing 'Beedi Jalai le' and bounding up the stairs of the hostel after a particulary distasteful meal of sticky noodles, stone hard peas masala and chapati. I am on a high. One of those highs which have no explanation, you know. Where you just feel light and are in a "singy" mood.

I take two steps at a time and I reach my floor. I turn sharply to find assorted men's underwear hanging on the railing of the steps. I am shocked and i stare uncouthly for a minute. I am in NO way interested in men's underwear. Its just that I find it rather strange to find men's underwear hanging on a floor which is a floor full of girls. I think "Jeeez. do these boys have no shame? Coming to the girls' floor and hanging their dirty..err..clean linen? eeeeks". I dismiss it as a sudden burst of insanity and walk towards my room still LOUDLY singing "Beedi Jalai le". I am at the part where Bipasha goes "jigar ma lagi aag..dhan te nan na na dhan te nan" and i sing particularly loudly and even break into a little jig.

I reach my room at the end of the corridor, put my key into the keyhole to open the door but strangely the door is open. I am surprised. I could have sworn my roommates left for Pondy. Oh well. Maybe they are back. I open the door with a flourish singing "Thandi hawa bhi khilaaf sasooriiiiiii" and I see three boys in various states of undress doing ermm.. various things totally and absolutely taken aback at this sudden female intervention and that too one which is singing a rather tapori song rather loudly and one which does not have the habit of knocking on doors.

Dense and absolutely brainless that I am I stare at them and go "Eh?"

My hand flies to my mouth as i realise my mistake and I swear rather loudly and use a word which i reserve for special occasions where I am in deep shit.

I am in the third floor standing in front of room 305 while my room is on the second floor and my room number is 205. Third floor is the "boys" floor.

I open and close my mouth not unlike a goldfish, almost as if I am waiting for them to apologise and vacate the room.

I then mumble a sorry and turn around to see another boy in the corridor grinning condescendingly at me.

I run like my pants are on fire and in an instant I am in my room on the bed aghast at what I have done

How could I have not noticed I was on the third floor?

How could I not see the big and bold "305" on the door?

How could I not miss the Garfield poster on my room's door?

How could I not miss the giggling of the girls and the general girlish smell of the corridor?

How could I not sense that it was the boys' dirty floor?

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!

Hmmm..Aaaarrghhh!!

Another year goes by, a decade just went by, its been four years now since this blog was started and I am 24. 24 is not a very nice age to be. For one you are terribly confused (its a different thing that i am always terribly confused but 24 is particularly confusing). You have no idea about the future. You are not sure you want what you are getting and you are not sure about getting what you want. You are apprehensive as hell because all of a sudden you are being pushed into adulthood. You have conversations with friends which you would never have dreamt of having three years back. Your priorities are being forced to change and suddenly you realize that the whooshing sound you hear is time just flying past you. You attend your college's alumni meet and you realise you are old and there are scores of juniors who you dont recognize, calling you akka and you want to sit and cry and come running back to college where your maximum worry was how to handle project reviews.

There were a certain set of ideals you had always lived by. Ideals which you built by reading loads and loads of books and watching movies. Suddenly you wish you could just throw all those books out of the window and burn them. You wish you were illiterate or had spent all these years reading mills and boon and danielle steele. At least that would have prepared you for certain things which Ayn Rand does NOT. You read Ayn Rand and you think you can conquer the world and suddenly all that comes crashing around you when you realise how perfectly ordinary you are and what a boringly normal course your life is taking. You reach that point in life where reality strikes you and you realise that the ideal world exists only in books and movies. Its almost like the child who realizes that santa clause doesnt exist or that spiderman is all animation and there is not really a man who can spin webs by just folding his fingers and pointing it at you.

You read books and fantasize a world where everything is exactly the way you want to be. You are Dominique Francon a minute and Howard Roark the other. You are Galahad and Jeeves. Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. Tintin and Asterix. Julian and Fatty. You are the strong character helping everyone and the one who everyone turns to. None of your favorite characters had ordinary lives and you grow up thinking its a sin to have an ordinary life. You build a world around those characters. And that world comes crashing down and you realise that its all make believe and what a weak and loser-ish person you really are in real life. Forget making the world happy, you cant even make the ones close to you happy. You are torn by your ideals (stupid as they are) and the real world (real, loving and caring as it is). A part of you knows that the latter is permanent and safe and which is what will make you happy if not now, then 10 years down the line and yet another part of you wants to break free. "Who wants safe? Safe is for wimps. Go out there are fly. So what if you will regret it 10 years later. At least you would have tried" that part says and your life now is a constant struggle between those two parts of your self. All your attempts to merge them fail and its almost like suffering from multiple personality disorder.

You suddenly wish time would fly faster, either forward or backward, as long as you dont have to face this stage in your life where simple decisions seem herculean. You dont want to be 24. 17 was nice. 31 will definitely be nice. But 24 is sad. And worse still is when you look around and you see people handling 24 gracefully and you wonder "How the hell do they do it man?". You see people who are 24 getting married and having children and you want to run and hide under a rock out of shame. You cant blame god because you are agnostic. You cant blame your parents and siblings because they are sane and sensible people, mature and composed when they were 24. You cant blame your friends because most of them are married or at least they know want they want when they turn 25. You cant blame your stars because you are skeptical about astrology. Its just you.

Oh my God. Am i suffering from quarter life crisis an year before i become a quarter century old? Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrghh!!!