Ambitions again..

As a child I wanted to be a teacher since they are the people I idolized ....I wanted to dress like them, talk like them, know everything in all the subjects like them, have the authority to scold other children like them :-)
Then came the doctor phase when I was gifted a doctor playset, complete with a stethoscope, a lab coat and a syringe. I remeber doing surgery on my stuffed toys, splitting their stomach with a pair of scissors, taking out some cotton and stitching it back with needle and thread. I used to apply Burnol over the cut to make it look like raw medicine applied over an incision. Erich Segal's Doctors contributed to that ambition.
Then one day I developed a fascination towards designing clothes. Liked the cool way in which figures were sketched and colors were splashed to make an outfit. Liked the idea of designing clothes with a theme or a meaning. I remember the trip to Paris was when I was at the peak of that ambition.
One fine day architecture occured to me. A perfect blend of creativity and mathematics. Fountainhead happened. It changed my way of thinking. Made me feel I could change the world with designs. Dad's friend was a naval architect and somehow that term sounded cool ...naval architecture was my ambition for some time.
For a very brief period of time I wanted to be a lawyer, the glamour and oratory skills of some of ma's colleagues impressed me but soon I realized I could not lie straight faced and usually lost all the arguments to my mom :(
Biology was my favorite subject and I thought I would make a good doctor till I went to submit my joint entrace form to a government medical hospital in Calcutta....there was a man who had lost his hand lying on a stretcher, blood dripping....there was a death in a nearby ward and the cries and howls of people filled the entire hallway .... I could not bear it .... I could not bear to see people in pain, suffering, crying ..... I realized it was the end of my dream. I would never make a good doctor. The dissection of toads in biology classes was something I could not get over, it used to haunt me in my dreams, made me nauseous at dinner. Medicine was removed from my list permanently.
Since I loved Biology and medicine was not going to work out I thought I'd take up genetics or microbiology and become a research scientist. But zoology/botany seemed the most boring subjects on the planet and soon I realized I would not be able to live my life working on animals and plants.
Economics attracted me once but soon turned out to be dry and materialism oriented.
Accounting class as an elective in 10th standard was fun but repititive.
Dancing brought out the best in me and I was perfectly happy doing it. But doing well in academics hindered the chances of taking up dancing as a profession.

Engineering was there at the back of my mind but I did not know if I really wanted to be an engineer...wouldn't it be dry and mechanical? I had never touched a computer till then.

I walked into engineering thinking that it would be like math and physics, interesting and philosophical. Some of the courses I hated, some I liked and some I loved and the rest is history ...

Today as I sit here coding and debugging I ask myself "Is this what I have come to this planet for? Is this going to be my contribution to the world? Writing software for corporate benefits, taking home a good pay packet, eating, sleeping and getting back to work again next morning? 10 years down the line where will I be? same cubicle maybe in a different company, may be here, maybe higher in the hierarchy managing people who do the same writing software for corporate benefits, taking home a good pay packet, eating sleeping and getting back to work again next morning.........."

I am starting my search for the right dream again..... a new list and a new set of ambitions

Decision after confusion

Today I took a big decision that could prove to be a turning point in my life .....
Today I tried diplomacy and learnt I am bad at it......
Today I re-learnt that honesty will never let you down .....
Today I realized again that there is nothing more peaceful than a clear conscience!
----

Unwinding....

Today I had a long day, long enough to be saturated to the brim...one of those days when I forget about my meals, gulp down cans of diet coke, do not browse or chat or read the news, change my clothes in 5 secs flat, when the rest of the world outside the computer screen seems unfamiliar....
That set me thinking as to what are the things that I could derive the most comfort from....
1. An hour long hot shower with 93.9 fm or bubble bath with a book
2. A quiet walk by the lake
3. A phone call to my sis....complete entertainment! The conversation would include the description of an eventful day , about calcutta's weather, about complaints on how mom is partial with me, about the tv serials which everyone watches, about the times in the future when she is gonna come and stay with me and drive me nuts, about her friends' relationships, about dad's regularly repeated questions, about new entries to her shopping wish list from here, about how she never understands what I work on and study :) etc etc etc
4. A good movie
5. Cooking something new
6. Painting
7. ............ actually coming to think of it all I would do once the issue gets fixed is crash!!
Sleep is priceless!

Pattern Typing ?!!

I noticed that my handwriting has deteriorated .....it has almost reduced to scribbles now ...no orientation, sometimes slanting in one direction and sometimes straight, small and haphazard ..... after all those childhood years of pattern writing and writing with fountain pens on ruled exercise books and then of course the three hour long history exams on white sheets where we would even hesitate to give our fingers a break lest we run out of time since our scores depended so much on the presentation! Filling ink in fountain pens the night before school, initially with the ink filler and then the cartridges and the discovery of microtipped pens which wrote with ink but did not leak!
Keyboards and keypads have taken over ..... now I endeavour to speed up my typing, do not carry a pen/paper, prefer to make a note in notepad, address books, calendars or to-do lists or the even better the post-it notes software on the desktop, have forgotten my spellings, read vernacular languages at the speed of a tortoise, submit assignments in pdf, make drawings on paint, play tic-tac-toe or do crosswords online and when I have to jot down my thoughts I blog.
Are fountain pens headed towards extinction?