The New Year

It didn't start off well for me, neither did the old one end well for me. The problems of the old one kept running into my hopes for a splendid new one. For once I was willing to suspend my disbelief in all things good, and party my way off to a wannabe great start to a new year. But that was not to be! A week since the start of '09 and I think I am already down into the pits. Financial losses galore, the gloom of the recession biting into whatever bit of job remains in hand, and turmoil on the home front have all begun to take a huge toll. I remember a similar situation 10 years back, when I definitely did moonwalk into the troubles of depression. Then I converted into a loner, stopped going to school, took to travelling alone to distant parts of Mumbai city and just sit on some sidewalk and watch the world pass by. I went to lonely movie halls and saw porn movies galore sitting besides other loner losers wanking off their hard ons. I used to leave home early in the morning, and come back home late in the night, and my parents used to be happy in the belief that I am studying my ass off to glory. The examination results that came in a few months later were a shocker, not for me, but for my parents. I was surprised that I failed in just one subject, my parents were surprised that I ended up with the first failed subject in my life. The depression days continued for about a year, after which I pulled up my socks and put my life back in order. Sadly, it was a very difficult and steep climb up and today I might have been in a much better position in life had I not had that worrisome bout some 10 years back.

Today looks similar, in fact even bigger, at least then I didn't have to worry about where my next meal was gonna come from. And as my emotional resilience is down in the shatters, I hope that "The Tough gets going" really works for me.

Just yesterday at work, I felt as if I had died and, for some unknown reason, was still breathing. Humiliation is something you can't put a price label on, and quantify the loss.

I always maintained in my life, that I want to do work that I love, rather than work for the sake of collecting money. I know this is a ridiculously privileged attitude since so much of the world must concern itself with getting food. But I was (and still am) one of the privileged: I've always had clean water, clothes to spare, enough to eat. But still sadly enough, when you lose money that you had managed to accumulate after some years of hard work, that's when you realize that although money is not what you worked for, when it goes away, it does bite.

I have spent days agonizing over "How could you, why did you, why couldn't you, why me, what's the matter with the world, where's justice" kind of questions, to realize that these questions are better left unanswered, rather they will remain unanswered because no one knows the answers. Not even the experts. I have also been eager to blame someone else -- anyone else -- for the mess I am in. But after sucking myself into a Katrina of blame games, I begin wondering where does the blame end?

Unlike many people who lost everything in the stocks and scams, and unlike so much of the world, I still have money to live day-to-day. I am still working, and I am still living and eating well, and there is still nothing else I would rather do, than do the work I am doing right now. But still. I go to sleep at night oscillating between ranting about the world and being terrified that I will lose my job and I won't be able to keep my house. Then I realize that, for me, the real suffering is not living without money; it's living with this rage. The devastation is bad, but if I don't allow myself to feel this, then I can't learn what there is to learn. I will not see, for instance, that I participated in my own downfall by not adhering to sound processes that my workplace believes in.

And while my downfall is really, really minor as compared to thousands of crores of investor wealth that got lost in the equity bourses, and so also my humiliation as compared to the embarassment that the chief of Satyam, R Raju has to face when he revealed that he has fleeced the company and its stakeholders of 7000 crores, I still can't stop the blame game. Even when well wishers snap at me advising me to gather my wits, I accuse them of not being sympathetic enough with my concerns. And if I don't engage in blame, I see the answer clearly: because I believed in something else more -- I believed in accumulating. And when you believe in accumulating, you see what you don't have, not what you have. My relationship to money was no different from my relationship to food, to love, to looking good: I never felt as if I had enough. I was always focused on the bite that was yet to come, not the one in my mouth. I was focused on the way my partner wasn't perfect, not the love that was. And on the chiselled body I saw on a gym boy poster, not the health that reflected from my rounded cheeks.

Although there is the loss, there is also the necessity -- the urgency-- of staying in the moment. The money I lost will never come back. And some sadness to grieve for the same is justified. But from the path of sadness I often wander into fear -- what if my parents or I get sick and we can't pay the medical bills, what if there is an accident and I can't work, what will I do when I get old -- I'm lost, too. I need someone to guide me from this path of fear back to the path of sadness back to the path of contentment. And happiness. And I need to realize that I need to look inside me for finding this someone.