A Retrospective

As the year 2005 is coming to a seemingly uneventful end, there had been many a things which were experienced by me for the first time in my life, in this year. So many things that looked so distant last year are already past me, by now.

After a rocking end to the last year with the most memorable outing with my friends for the study tour, this year came in with lots of tests staring at me. Though campus recruitments were of the top priority, they were sidelined by the marriage of my sister. The biggest event of my life till date & this one left me with lots of lessons to learn with a hell lot of sweet & sour memories. First time in life I knew what event management meant. Living in a nuclear family, there were fewer people to help us out & a lot of planning & implementation had to be done. I learnt how, even a small mistake can spoil the entire situation & how, even a minute improvisation can turn the tables in your favour. I wish I could explain what I gained & what I lost out of this entire experience. Many may feel that just a wedding ceremony can’t be this educative but for me, who had to be involved in all the intricacies of the job it was no less than a crash course of ‘life’!

I can’t really say that I enjoyed it fully, because I still remember those sleepless nights & tense days thinking about how to make the event of my only sister’s wedding a sparkling success. To a good extent we were successful but at the cost of our enjoyment in the occasion. In fact I didn’t even have the time to see if there had been any eye candies at the reception! But no regrets at all, as after this I was much richer in terms of experience & that’s what I value most.

Next came the campus-mania. By the time I realized that it was knocking my doors, I could see that I had just about a week in hand! Not being able to sit for Infy didn’t move me by one little bit but I had different reasons for that. However, getting through Wipro was just like a sweet dream. That one week of preparation seemed to be like a year. The thought of not getting through & preparing again & again for other choices made me shiver. After a relatively easy written test, there was a harrowing interview staring at my face. Getting through my technical & HR interviews are the topics on which I can write a book. But lets not elaborate on that now & somehow I was selected by Wipro. As I say always, this is probably the greatest academic achievement in my life as yet. The feeling of succeeding in the first two interviews of my life has still not sunk into me properly. Yet another gift to me from this year!
To add to this euphoria, many of my good friends also got through some company or the other & this meant a lot to me.

After getting selected, life was as light & easy as never before. With nice & pleasant hallucinations about a life as an executive with a handsome salary & a smooth living invaded the mind & hours passed by imagining how things would be, one year later. But this wasn’t there to last. Soon the bare realities started pouring in from the friends who’d joined their jobs! Soon I realized that there was so less to cherish & so much to perish, in near future. As a result, those nice hallucinations gave way to rising tensions!

But there was another good thing coming up for me & that was a holiday to Jammu & Kashmir! I’ve written enough about it & I would repeat that I witnessed absolute heaven on earth (much clichéd). Another experience that left me spellbound! I really don’t know if ever again I would be able to be in a place as beautiful as that.

Thereafter also there were various things that peppered my living. Some were pleasant & the rest were bitter. I went through phases of elation as well as depression. The first real live seminar of my life, the first ever combined project of my life, the departure of some of my best friends from the city & reinstating a few tarnished relations with relatives were all a part of these phases.

Finally how can I forget about my preparations for the MBA entrance exams! The extremely late preparations for the CAT ensured that I messed it up. The last minute spark of intellect to go hard at it, hit me back, hard! And most agonizingly, the trauma is far from over.

Now you know why I called the end of this year to be uneventful, because there has been so much for me in it that now no event seems to be an event, big enough to be mentioned. I can’t really say how exciting the next year would be for me but I don’t think it can be close enough to this one. Though I wish just the opposite! Lets wait & watch.