The middle age blues

I do not know whether it happens to all 45-year old men and women. But it has happened to me.

What is so interesting you may ask?

Before I answer this, I would like to go back to the time when I turned 40. A good five years ago - March 2002 to be exact.

A wave of chronological highlights all through my working life ( about 20 years by then) began flashing in my mind. I was often lost in my mental world about where I was heading and what was the journey I had set out ,travelling on and on from 1982. Alternate emotions - often opposite- began hitting my system wherever and whenever. There were achievements one could be very proud and possessive about but overtaking them were blunders of the Himalayan kind about which one could not be too happy sharing it with anyone.

Dear friends, that is where my journey began. A special travel tale, if you want it to be announced thus!!

Call it foolish or a high-risk behaviour, as my work contract expired with my erstwhile employer in January 2003, I had decided that I would just not work for the next five years.

Simply put, I decided to follow my heart. The justification - not that anyone needed to certify my stance - was that I had put in a non-stop worklife of 20 years and more and that it is now time to see how I can do things all on my own....

In all these four years and more, what did I get from the time it all started in January 2003?

A host of real world experiences, grave and repeated pressures on my savings and financial reserves, constant battering of my professional worth and esteem and a conscience which always was in an evaluatory mode on whatever I set to accomplish. You know, the right or wrong approach....

So how do I see myself as the experiment era comes to an end in March 2008?

As part of my mental battles, I wanted to just evacuate my system many times over in many different forms and fora and expunge my mind from the stress that comes up when the world fixes its gaze relentlessly on you. Subconsciously, one plays the duniyadaari game and is on a daily parole from the jail of life....

Diaries seemed inadequate, both from the space and convenience point of view. You just wrote a diary or did not for extended periods of time, thereby losing the objective of keeping a record of your experiences. The writer in me, the entrepreneur in me or plainly the trader in me, just kept egging me on to put it down somewhere the present status of mine - Forty Five and Unemployable....

This is no sad story. Nor is it is a fable of a frustrated soul venting his spleen. It is a sum of my joys and sorrows, a miniaturised replica of what I went through in the growing up and consolidating phase of my life prior to this second innings. Surprising, that life patterns repeat again and again. Why is it so typecast one will never know...

I wish to just write in a loosely structured format about the people and places, pressures and pleasures of a man who just decided to follow his heart - if melodrama is your poison - then I will add - just dropping himself from a 9-to-5 routine and doing his own.

Guys, among the zillions of blogs, I am sure I too have a place under the sun.

Fasten your seat belts then.....