2013, Come Gone!

So when I was much younger. Let’s give that a number. When I was 3. I would stand at the door of my uncle’s house and look at the guests leave and announce to the entire house, ‘PEOPLE COME GONE’. It was my simple way of saying, ‘Wow that was quick’ and it sounded really adorable from the mouth of a three year old me. Now, most of 2013 felt that way, especially the second half.

The first half of 2013 revealed a side of me that I have come to detest in me and in any person now. It is rather easy for me to feel that way and it is unfair to other people but then again I come from a vantage point on this and feel rather justified in my feelings. The first half was sluggish, emotionally annoying and was filled with very little optimism. The crappy part was that I had only myself to blame for this rather terrible downswing but in hindsight, it was only good because the months that followed played out like a high paced movie which married Hollywood’s slickness and Bollywood’s masala like never before. Well atleast that is what I tell myself.

June, saw me spending many days in front of mirrors and under showers wondering how I had allowed everything become so miserable and dreary. I used to love work but I was labouring through it now. I wasn’t connecting socially, I was barely social and I was content in this emotional quicksand. The strange part now is, I am not even sure if I decided to get my act together or my act decided to get itself together, if you know what I mean. Because suddenly from ‘crawl like a turtle’ I went to ‘fly like the wind’. The month of July took me to Mumbai, Meerut and Singapore and all of them included a personal debut. My first time compering a corporate event, my first North Indian wedding and my first time outside India. After those three weeks, I was a changed man. I just wasn’t going to allow me to ruin myself and since that moment on it feels like the old ‘me’ had COME GONE. Poof it was over.

Now, I just needed to do everything. Everything seemed exciting, everything seemed to symbolise the end of what it meant to be me and I liked that. Do you know the feeling when you feel yourself change? You don’t know if it is good for you or if you will lose the things people loved about you, but you don’t stop to care? It is a very liberating feeling. I did pause to think of how it would affect me in the long run but there was just no time. I decided to run again after a failed attempt to get my mind and body in sync back in March. This time I spent a lot of time reading, researching and structuring the rest of my life around the need to be fit. The food I ate, the amount I ate, my resistance to waking up in the morning, temptation to eat junk food, all of it had to change. This wasn’t going to be a half assed effort. And to infuse some seriousness into it, I threw in the small matter of a 10km run at the Wipro Chennai Marathon. I can quite easily submit that preparing for the run was one of the most satisfying two months of my life. I learned that there was another gear in me, both physically and mentally. I joined a gym, started eating untouchables like beetroot again and the discipline was actually addictive. The few days without it still make me nauseatic. Funny how the nausea of the first six months didn’t push me to change it all, shows there is much to be understood about the human psyche. The 1^st of December brought me a lovely overcast morning and 7000 other enthusiasts who had decided to change something about themselves. This truly was already a victory for me, to be running in the happiest place in Chennai that day. I surprised myself and many who were following and supporting me closely in the last two months by posting a rather decent time, but more than anything a part of me had changed forever when I crossed that finish line. Being a pathetic version of myself, allowing my circumstances to get the better of me and deciding not to change had all COME GONE now. I had outrun it all.

In the process of all this change I suddenly woke up with a rather weird feeling in the stomach, one morning late October. I woke up, washed my face and sat on my bed wondering what was on my mind. I had changed the way I processed the thoughts in my head. There weren’t large spaces of introspection, just a quick realisation and then action. This was one of those moments. It started a chain of events that some thought was quick and rash, some saw it as well considered and some are yet to completely comprehend. In the weeks that followed that day concluding on the 18^th of December, I had interviewed at a company that sells some of the funnest things in the country and hires about 60 people, I had quit my job and been offered what I can easily sum up as a dream job and I had decided to leave the city I loved to make the move across the border to Bangalore. Yes 2013 also signalled the end of my short but lovely time in Chennai with a move scheduled in mid-February. Till this day I am fascinated by the reactions I get from people when I tell them I’m moving. These reactions revolve around me leaving Chennai, the speed with which it happened and the company I am joining but what truly leaves me incredulous is at the conviction with which I concluded a thought that began that morning. It surely stemmed from a part of me that was fighting to be heard from long but the conviction surely arose from this new belief in me.  Belief that has surely COME but ain’t be GONE for some time now.

2013 will always remain a monumental year in my life. It involved travel, running, brilliant movies, (special mentions to Kai Po Che, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, Ship of Theseus, Raanjhana and Lootera) realizing the meaning of true friendship and finding in me - a spirit. This spirit does not know what exact moment revived it but I sure do know that the resurrection has been strong, the long term impact is unknown but there is a part of me that is ready to overlook the consequences in pursuit of the result. From this have emanated some resolutions for the year, simple ones that I’m very excited about and have already begun to gently put in practice. I can rather happily report, that they are working but more on that later in the year.

But for my biggest fans however little in number you may be, my friends and family, I have completed the process of re-engineering myself (as my Whatsapp status has been declaring for rather long now) and I am in a zone of progression. I hope to see more of you this year, I hope to change perceptions everyday mostly for the better and hope to continue evolving and improving my version of myself. I can actually see ‘three year old me’ saying, ‘Som you sure COME GONE eh’.

2014, anyone?