Yet another birthday

I turned 24 last week and though on every birthday I sit alone and ponder over the significant happenings in my previous year, this time I decided to do it more systematically by writing a blog post. While I'm too undisciplined to write and maintain a diary on a daily basis, a quick recall and introspection on every birthday of how life has been the previous year is probably a good practice.

I must admit that I totally enjoy all the attention I get on my birthdays. All the dear and near ones keep calling and sending text messages throughout the day, my grandma from Mysore sends a greeting card without fail, my colleagues try to be a little nicer that day, C shall have two gifts ready. One is a planned gift which I get after forcibly answering that difficult question - "What do you want?" and the other one is a "surprise gift". I love how my mom on her own tactfully tries to understand what I want and buys it for me or gives me the money to buy it. Then there are these "friends" on facebook who post birthday wishes though I hardly reciprocate the same on their birthdays.

While I feel special throughout the day, when I get into my own space, it feels terrible. As usual, I have hardly done anything that makes me proud. No significant milestones, no major change in lifestyle, no change in the ridiculous selfishness and self obsession with which I've always lived my life. For most part, I've been busy with nothing other than developing and maintaining some software that I can never relate to. Worse, I haven't done that really well too! Life has been so pointless and ordinary. There is a lot to do, a lot to change and there's no time. I have to rush.

The most exciting thing that happened last year was the birth of my nephew. My favorite pastime has been getting entertained by this unbelievably well behaved and adorable kid. While I think that a lot of kids appear well behaved to everyone except their parents, I'm sure this kid's parents wouldn't disagree with me.

I have made a few new friends but two of them have been special. One is N, whom I also hold in high regard for his thought processes and the other one is my roommate S who despite being a great friend is a hero for reasons which I'll write about in a different blog post.

Reading has never been as much as I wanted it to be. However, here are the books I read last year -

• Stumbling on happiness - Daniel Gilbert
• Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell
• Akka - P Lankesh
• Mookajjiya Kanasugalu - Dr K Shivarama Karantha
• Thinking fast and slow (incomplete) - Daniel Kahneman
• India after Gandhi - Ramachandra Guha (This one is my most favourite)
• The Cartoon Introduction to Economics - Part 1 - Klein and Bauman
• Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
• The Good Boatman (currently reading) - Rajmohan Gandhi

Hell! That's not even one per month! Shameful.

I did an online course on Social Psychology and also got to do quite a bit of reading on some of the prominent topics on psychology. For anyone interested in learning something seriously online, I recommend coursera.

I've traveled more than I thought I would and here are the new places I visited - 

Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Bharatpur, Zainabad (Little Rann of Kutch), Thol, Velavadar, Munnar, Yercaud.

Watching plays has been my favourite hobby. I have watched over 30 plays and what's special is that the movies to plays ratio has been around 1:5. A lot of plays have been fantastic but one experience that will stay with me forever is the play we watched the whole night at Kalagrama. It started at 8:30 P.M and got over at 5 next morning. The play was an adaptation of Kuvempu's "Malegalalli Madumagalu". An interesting and successful experiment indeed.

Unbelievably, I took up running more seriously than ever! I ran 10K twice last year, along with occasional 5K, 3K and lesser K runs. These have been great fun. Today, I just can't believe that when we were made to run over 1km a day on chilly mornings at my boarding school, I bitched about my P.E teacher and tried all possible tricks to escape.

Now I have stepped into a new year with, I believe, a new zeal and conviction. I just hope it lasts long. It would be a disaster if I won't be more content about my life when I turn 25.