As You Life It...( Turns 2.5 years old!)

Dear Friend ,

Once upon a time I used to know a thirteen-year-old boy who was convinced that he was destined to become something spectacular in life .

Then one day, he grew up.

Soon, the day slipped into years . And the years into decades . Until one fine morning when he looked into the bathroom mirror and found a stranger in there. A stranger who reminded him of a typical non-hero character out of a Woody Allen movie, someone who was standing at intermission and unable to account for the thousands of days that had slipped by, taking all his innocent and absurd dreams with them.

That thirteen year old boy used to be me . Or maybe he used to be you. The you, you left behind – at misty bends and messy ends, as you went about earning your scars and chasing illusions you mistook for real life.

Time is indeed a queer commodity that is reconstructed in memories and deconstructed in regrets as it goes by. Most of us sleepwalk through our youth in trying to win some kind of identity . Then we stumble upon middle age & scramble to preserve that identity . And suddenly, standing at mid-point , we realize that somewhere in this medley of all the artificial races we were enlisting in, we have quietly let go of our greatness. Partly by default , partly by design. The first pangs of urgency hit us. We know this is no dress rehearsal. It is our own life that is gliding past. We straighten up and reach for it.

In many ways, 2019 has been that year for me. The year of pause and reset. The year of recalibration to find my personal 2.0. Agree, it might not fetch me that Olympic medal or get me a phone call from Stockholm in this lifetime, but it should at least bring forth the best in the rest of me. Someone had written somewhere that one day in your journey, the you who you became will come face to face with the you who you could have been . This year, and in the years ahead, I have chosen to test this out with my personal toolkit, my realizations from having lived a life of sorts. At least I owe it to the 13-year old who I would like to see eye to eye as we shake hands on the other side of the finish line.

Hence this book.

At the outset, let me clarify that I am not some Guru who has profound lessons to share through his book . I am someone who grew up in a middle class Indian home in small town India. I never went to an IIT or an IIM, though I would have loved to have. And while I have, during the two decades of my professional career, got opportunities to work with several bright men and women from around the world who have?formidable resumes and educational backgrounds, I am nowhere near them.

Having said that, I?have lived a life and earned a few scars in my own serendipitious journey this far. Like?millions of regular folks?out there . The Everyman in the subway, the business traveler at the boarding gate?, the sales person waiting at an office reception, the faceless participant in endless conference calls, the middle aged professional holding on to?a pride that’s fast nearing its expiry date.?Each one of us has a story to tell, a lesson to teach, a joke to share, and a tear to be wiped. If only we could find a way to snare it on print. The story of how we sowed our wild oats, and tried to build a life around it.

I had read this line somewhere - On the last day of your life, if you are asked to summarize your journey & document it , will you be okay to save the changes before you turn your engines off ?

This is a question I often ask myself these days. Especially on weekends. Because I realize that I now am?one more weekend closer to the finale. Growing older seems like a medical anomaly when you are twenty, an unsubstantiated rumor when you are thirty & a distinct possibility by the time you hit forty, as you enter the crossover years of mid-life existentialism where you have shed your youth but are unwilling to don your greys yet . On most days, you wake up feeling that you are in best years of your life where you are in in peak form - physically, intellectually and emotionally, sharp enough for combat , hungry enough to win, wise enough to know the right combats to pick, and the ones to let go. The problem is, the world around you doesn’t always think so. Suddenly head hunters stop calling you, and send polite messages insisting you are overqualified for a job. Suddenly you are passed over for promotions because you apparently have rigid views and opinions. Paradoxically so, because the same views and opinions were labelled as solid work ethic and can-do spirit in your younger days.

The good part of growing older however is that you start taking life in your stride, warts and all. You are no longer heartbroken at life’s unfairness, surprised at its asymmetric acceleration or grounded by its curve balls. You avoid looking for coherence in randomness and you stop expecting miracles. Most of all, you understand at a philosophical level that life is way too complicated to be rounded into a cause-effect story, and that there can never be one big overriding idea by which you will define happiness, which is perhaps the eventual goal of life. Hedonism , as you realize, is not the central purpose of life. But nor is Eudaimonia. The best life lies somewhere in the middle, where you walk a fine balance between pleasure and meaning. And this is perhaps the decade of your life where you start locking your ideas in your journal, your personal code of conduct arrived at through trial and error, through elation and tribulation, through victory and defeat, through love and loss. Gradually these ideas become your central theme of living. And make you smile wistfully as you look out into a hazy Saturday morning outside your bedroom window, recalibrating your dreams yet again , and refusing to sulk because life let you down once more , as it often does these days.

This book is my attempt to assemble those scattered life bytes from my journal. There is no method to how they are stacked. They are standalone entries from my blog, written at different points in time. Like everyone else, my inspirations are diverse – from the books I read, the people I meet, the work I do and the lives I observe. Some concepts?might seem repetitive, maybe because they are from heterogenous entries spread over a few years.?But I hope that by and large, some ideas from this book will connect with the larger audience out there, regular men and women like myself whose stories go untold . Unwritten. Unread.

I thank you for picking up this book. Because I think that somewhere along the way, a story of mine might intersect with a story of yours. Because there is one thing I have realized as I have grown older -?that we are all the same, beneath the colours of our skins and passports.

?I genuinely hope this book touches you in some small way .

Regards,

Ayon

2020

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'As You Life It' Completes 30 months of publication. My deepest thanks to my reader friends from all over the world who gave my humble book so much love. Thank you !

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