(A belated) birthday blog

As I watched yet another airplane close in on the Mumbai soil from my vantage point of a 15th floor house, offering a pretty flattering view of the city, it kind of summed up my 26th birthday for me – a perfectly lazy day topped by a nice windy evening. Just as the airplane would need to return to its base location for overhaul after umpteen trips a day all over the place, a nice quiet birthday gives me exactly that – an opportunity to evaluate year after year the changes that my life has undergone in the past one year, and whether I am better off with them.

I spent the day pretty much perfectly as I would have always wanted to on my birthday, mostly at home, lazing around, thinking about life and where it has brought me, about how many bloopers I need to make before I become wiser, of how many changes I need to experience before I am content with what I have. Forcing a couple of friends to join me for a temple visit in the evening, a 5th different one in 5 years :), completed the perfectly uneventful day for me.

This year marked a poora transformation from a Brahmacharya phase of life to a Grihastya phase, Brahmanically speaking. Not that I have any intention of being initiated into the practices of the latter phase in the very short term future. And in some senses, one does realize that all is not wrong with growing up, crib as we might later about not being able to do things that we wouldn’t think twice before committing ourselves to, when younger. I guess the marked difference arises not from becoming wiser with time, but from becoming less un-wiser – and these are not the same things. So in that case, I would kind of agree with the point of view of some people I know, who look forward to growing up – in a very non-chronological sense.

On another note, I guess it is good to have birthdays – at the very least, it gives a great opportunity to chat up with a whole bunch of folks, even after large periods of inactivity.

In due deference to the blogging trends this year, this blog too materializes way after its due. Let’s try not to make that a habit from now on, shall we?