In Search…

I owe my career to a school essay.

When I was in the sixth standard, I’d have been about 12 years then, I made a decision that was to have a far-reaching impact on my life.

I mean, no one takes a 12-year-old that seriously, and even less, take a school essay. However, as these things were then, I wasn’t old enough to know that. I took myself seriously. I was going to be a journalist.

In class we had to write an essay on what we would all like to be. I paid all writing assignments great attention; and this one, for some reason, got me. After mildly toying with the idea of becoming a scientist that would make phenomenal Nobel-winning discoveries, I rejected it with the cynicism that is unusual in a 12-year old. Though the rewards of that were tantalising, the process of getting there seemed long and arduous, if I even managed to get there, you know.

I don’t think I hesitated much after that stray thought. Journalism came into my head, pretending it had been there all the while. So, I wrote the essay and went on to live it. It is easy if you have a life goal – you just have to work your way towards it. Which I did, except for a brief dalliance with Mathematics when I could have done Advanced English in Higher Secondary. Rather pointlessly, I was in love with Mathematics then. Good teachers and my maths-whiz family are to blame I suppose.

But because of that dalliance, the fight got tougher. I discovered that at Stella Maris College, the literature department took people with Advanced English ONLY. Here I was, with 198 in Mathematics, and logically being shooed to the Commerce and Economics sections. Don’t blame them, because they din’t really know me, or my premature career graph.

Anyway, I took the test and after some serious exhibition of passion (for the language, and the department, I suppose) I got it, edgeways. I mean, everyone and their cats are part of the college mag in Stella Maris, and so was I. And the literary journal. Good times those.

Cut and clip to the next frame – Asian College of Journalism, Bangalore. I nearly din’t go, though it was the next right step. But I did. And unlearnt everything I had learnt thus far. Journalism is a different kettle of fish, I figured – there was word count and deadline, primarily. We learnt though, all over again, 20 of us, living it up simultaneously in a city that we all finally grew up in.

And then there was The Hindu. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, as it were. The ride was good, rocky at times, but that is part of the fun, isn’t it? If you only have this ambition and you reach it in as many years, what do you do? You decide to move out in three years. Or thereabout.

But that’s when you realise you don’t quite get to plan everything. You realise 13 years have passed you by as you sit sipping a cup of coffee at the canteen. Some things are indeed beyond or beneath your control. The maximum you get to do, is go with the flow.