As kids we always wanted to grow up because then we thought, adults led a happier life. They didn't have to attend school, never wanted to do home work and never be worried about exams and the worse results. Things didn't get much better in college either contradicting our expectations; we both went to colleges which were renowned for their ''discipline''. Where we expected to bunk classes, we felt threatened by the fact that 40% weightage was assigned for attendance. Where we had plans of sleeping peacefully after college, we were threatened by the assignments, presentations, case studies blah..blah. Where we thought, your faculty would be like 'exams and results are your responsibility; study if you want to", we were threatened by the n number of quizzes and online tests (of course all these accounted for our internal marks) we were supposed to attend,
During my MBA days, I remember there were times when we slept at 3 AM in the morning, woke up at 7 AM and were in class by sharp 8. We had a rule which goes "the last person to enter the class and first person to leave the class would (should) be the Faculty". Thanks to our punctual faculty members, we found us beaten down at 7:59 in class probably having skipped breakfast.
In the sessions that follow, they would be discussing the struggle of Narayana Murthy in founding Infosys or how Lakshmi Mittal started it all from scratch. It would always be an add on statement "You have the potential. You can be really some where."
I swear, that's the statement you would hear probably all the way down till your retirement. Or may be, even on your retirement day they would still say "you have more potential left in you."
As kids, we had different ambitions. We wanted to be something else. What trigerred off my thoughts on this was a name mentioned by Sivani in our conversation.
"Do you know where J is these days?"
The name was quite popular in our batch, no not just our batch, but in the whole school, definitely for the right reason. She was the school topper. We discussed her not because of her outstanding performance in school, but because of the attitude she carried. If you by any chance happen to score higher than her, she would cut off from you completely until the next exam where in she would be the topper again.
"She used to say that she wanted to take up Medicine as her stream an then go in for higher studies in Cardio".
We tried searchng her in FB, but little luck.
Having left this conversation, some where in our head as we moved on with our routine life, I was really surprised rather shocked to hear about her from another school mate.
She got married off immediately after her 12th and now is a divorced mother of two.
The irony in life, looks strange but cruel at times. Often we don't end up getting what we wanted or being what we wanted. Its foolishness to expect it.
The best way out would be to 'be prepared for worst in life'.
