of hopes and fears...

their are moments that change your life...never to be the same again. one such moment stuck me yesterday afternoon.

i have lived 22 years of my life fed on the diet of constant , superlative success. without ever realizing it i changed into a shallow, insular, arrogant bully. and then the crashes came . starting 8Th may 2006. and once they did, they did so in profusion ,5 in a year , on personal and professional fronts.

i had never known what it was to swim against time and tide. spoilt on a constant diet of lifeboats ..i cried foul.

the latest of the series came one day before . it was the deepest felt and yet,in a surprising manner the most easily shrugged off.

24 hours of aimless wanderings brought nothing home besides mounting tiredness and an ever growing morass of depression.

one quiet afternoon changed everything.

yesterday afternoon i stood on my back balcony. half in light , half in shade. mid march sun warmed my heart . and then the wind started blowing. funneled and channeled by the buildings encroaching both sides of the narrow service lane it moved across my face at kiss- a -second speeds.

bathed in this glowing, whirling, swaying orange fantasy i felt as if i can fly.( thanks to Icarus i did not try...lol)

suddenly, the whole logic and purpose of life came unstuck.

hounded by the fear of failure , its likelihood and its social fall outs i had forgotten something. i had forgotten to live. to make the most of a young brilliant life.

trapped in my own prisons of past and by the reasons of future i forgot to peek into the heart of my present. i had forgotten to cherish my efforts and endeavours , savour the golden minutes of hard work that i put in, and love the feeling of logging hundreds of tired days laced with optimism ..imbued with hope and colored with dreams.

i had stopped being myself .

i narrate this because its wider and deeper than my felt emotions.

it transcends the margins of my own set of feelings and realities and represents the story of every young man and woman who has ever dared to have a dream very close to his or her heart.

we forget that we are more than the sum of our circumstances.
we are the leading lights of the plays that our own lives are. we form the centrepieces of all the music that we unwittingly produce in our everyday lives.

I'll sum up with quoting iqbal

sitaron ke aage jahan aur bhi hain
abhi ishq ke intehaan aur bhi hain
tu shaheen hai, parvaaz hai kaam tera
tere saamne bhi aasma aur bhi hai

to everyone who has ever been in love with a vision..a dream, an idea...