I always had penchant for people who led their lives differently. The whole fun in interacting with such people is that the more you try to extract their mind the lesser you will understand them. And nonetheless to say there's a kind of thrill in it. But sometime down the lane they would have made a huge difference in your life. In the attempt to understand/imitate/ape/just do what that particular individual is/had been doing, you would have made your own individuality yourself.
As a kid I remember meeting this man at the Hyderabad airport(the old one at the Begumpet) when he had come down to spend some leisure time with us in between his otherwise tight schedule and there he looked to me like the quintessential businessman in our the then Hindi films. He being my mom's brother and she being the only sister, I got to hear stories after stories about him, before I met him at the airport. My weak memory now filled with all the adulthood junk doesn't let me remember any of those moments that I got to spend with him while he was at Hyderabad. After he left and during the years I grew, I became more interested to learn about him. The way how a presence of a person makes difference to your life is a complete one hundred percent perceptional feeling and cannot be expressed how much ever articulate you try be. And thats exactly what I felt. In the days when you got to see majority of men or for that matter, working individuals for whom ending their day's work was as important as being at work in time, here was a man who was working on his will, travelling round the globe at his will, in-short was dictating his life instead the other way round which was the way of life for all other individuals I knew during that time. And added to that he being the only Engineering grad in the whole family lot that I knew, obviously there was a foolish affinity towards engineering. The fact that I opted for a Electrical Engineering degree while he was into mechanical is a proof that how I successfully screwed up my understanding of him. For if I had atleast made an attempt to understand what he was doing, the kind of stuff that he was into, using my otherwise dumbass brain I might have looked at my life differently.
So there I was among the whole lot of post high school students getting into a engineering degree with a huge million dollar question inside me of why I chose to study Electrical Engineering?Was it because I wanted to be like him for what was he? Did I know him better? Do I have a path defined in the coming days to travel alongside him in a similar journey as his? With the academic structure and the peer group around me the reason why I chose to enter into such a degree completely died inside me. So by the time I came out of the 4 year grind I was a confused alien on a novice planet. Human mind is so adamant that though to the world you look like a soul living life as it comes, it is meanwhile caught in a staunch retrospection though you tend to oppose it. And this phase of retrospection began as soon as I got out of my college with my degree.
During the days when I was on a job hunt post my bachelor's degree I got disturbed and disappointed at the huge crowd wanting to enter the firms which were into information technology services. No doubt they had the grandeur appeal to attract the just graduated crowd and just in a short span they would all be in an attire same as my uncle when I first met him at the Hyderabad airport. So is that all it took to become like him? that's all ? if that was all today I tell you it takes nothing. But that's not true. There was something else. While I might have easily got embroiled into one such firms my perception of him came back alive like a live wire. I immedietly swore to myself that I will rather make some pennies doing odd jobs and not get into such firms. My short stint at a call center further reaffirmed my decision. All said and done, today when I am part of a global team designing interfaces for a renowned car brand I take a childish pride in myself for doing something that I love to do. What I am doing is not even a one hundredth of a fraction of what he did or what he might go on to do but the kind of understanding my tiny little brain has got of this extraordinary individual is that the feeling is the same. Both of us are doing what we like to do. Three cheers to my uncle who taught me through his presence that there is a different way of looking at life.
