A journey begins

A whirlwind end to a year and a beginning.
Between 18th and 23rd I traveled to Behrampur, Murshidabad distt., for a theatre performance and with thick fogs along the tracks and trains delayed by days, was on the road for six days for that one-hour performance.
Returning back, I wrapped the remaining days of my corporate career and cleaned up my old apartment, thanks to a very special friend from Bangalore flying over to help me with that.
After sojourning with a friend in Gurgaon and my cousins in Delhi for the past two days,  I leave for Auli today for a fortnight of skiing. It's so frigging cold out there and the roads so so bad (The drives to Joshimath are never a pleasure in the best of weathers) and I don't really know why I am doing this to myself.

My training  will recommence in Feb second half and I still have not written anything for close to half a year now. To be honest, nothing feels different - it just seems like an extended weekend where I just happen to live out of several suitcases, repacking and shuffling stuff between them all the time.

Hopefully, Auli will break the pattern of these last eight years post-MBA.

Some things in life are like a smile spread in the horizon towards where I march and I am thankful for that.

A few portraits of friends, new and old, that were there with me in these days, tho', I realize now, only a sample from all that were there.

Day 1

Starting a new day, a new life today. Strange how mundane it seems right now, like a lazy Sunday where  I have managed to get nothing on my todo's and hence feeling a little overwhelmed by the time at hand.  It is this lost connection with time that I somewhere seek to re-establish. To disentangle from the spools of imagined arbitrary deadlines tugging at my feet all the time, for all the inconsequential tasks without purpose and ends, forgotten the minute they are done. The motions without the movements.

In the past few years I consciously refrained from taking any direct responsibility where a task would belong to me and me alone and the measure of my worth would be how much I have been able to achieve to the targets set at the beginning. Instead, I took the consultative and coordinative approach, and lucrative as that line of career is, many a time much more than the direct line responsibility, I have doubts about its utility having been so close to the ground and seeing the grease of the cogs, hearing their straining screeches and clangs.

I am tired of dissembling now, of the half-hearted ill-planned plunge everyday into the pits where I do not belong. Of being someone I am not, of pretending to.

Much as the work ahead now looming like a hulking Cyclops and staring defiantly at me with that terrible eye, people are important. So many of them accumulated over the years and yet each as much of consequence as myself. I should never forget that. There would be some worthier of trust and affection, unimpeded, than others and I should never forget that too.

A new day looms ahead. Like every other day. But today I mark with a chalk, an arbitrary chalky beginning.

Stories are neither the beginnings or the ends but how the middle bit is played. The mundane, the routine, sans flourish. That's where stories achieve greatness.