LAYERS

With me, what you see is not what you get. Sometimes you see more, sometimes you get more. I think in layers – a logical plan (with scores of related ideas connected to it), a backup to the plan, and a backup for that backup. And that is why I surprise myself when I have only one subject/object on my agenda. Interestingly enough, when I look back, I realise that it is these obsessions that I relish most when they fructify.

I applied for only two scholarships (and was awarded both), I am looking at just one job at the moment, unlike my fellow MBAs, and I am very likely to get it. It’s just not me. And yet, it is. Some big businessman (either Carnegie or Warren Buffet, I am not sure which of them) once said, ‘put all your eggs in one basket and watch it’. I always thought I’m not the type who would fall for it, but I am doing just that. Why?

A very bright friend of mine, to whom I am getting quite attached these days, pointed out recently that everything I do seems like a battle I’m fighting with myself. Just a day later Joe (the organisational psychologist I have been working with) said that I was putting too much ‘deterministic pressure on the personal perpendicular pronoun’ and asked me to reflect on it for sometime before coming up with a response. Am I really striving for perfection? Do I really think it will make me or my people happy? I don’t know. I just want to live my life to the fullest and the only way I can think of living it well is by doing what I like doing, by trying to do justice to my potential.

Where will this quest stop? Well, why should it? Remember the story of Matsya avatar - the fish that kept growing to fit the pond, the river and then almost the ocean itself? I feel like that fish sometimes. The good thing about it is that it never felt a fish out of water. I don’t either - even if I am the only atheist who loves the idea of God, religion and Bhakti; even if I am the only rationalist who values emotions more. I am an amphibious fish ambitious to fly!