That noughties show

I have rather vivid memories of the New Year’s Eve at the end of the previous decade. There was a party that evening in the RKPuram hostel, to celebrate the end of an international UNESCO-driven student conclave at our school. Luv Sharma was very clearly smitten by that Egyptian girl and was out all guns blazing to woo her, while I was rather uncomfortably coy in wishing the two Bulgarian girls dancing next to our group a happy new year. The guy from DPS Nepal was being a very enthusiastic jumping jack, but mostly good-naturedly.

The Australian cricket team was about to arrive at Indian shores, fully intending to continue their marauding ways, before being stopped at Eden Gardens. Apple was yet to establish its tech hegemony, France had just become the only team to simultaneously hold the World Cup and the Euro Cup, a mention of terrorism elicited fuzzy images of distant scuffles in third world countries, Web 2.0 was an unheard of concept, and Alta-vista and Yahoo were the default choices if you wanted to do a search on the internet.

While it wasn’t for us to brood over what the next decade could be like, an event earlier in the day, rather unwittingly, had sort of decided that for some of us – the IITJEE screening results had been out earlier in the morning, and while for some of us it was the first starry-eyed step towards what we hoped the following decade would be like, some others were very much in deep thought about what they should be doing next. Such is the nature of the exam, I guess – for all its focus on meritocracy, there were always a few extraordinary but unlucky folks who missed out – also perhaps a first reminder of how even the most honest tests could be so unfair.

Subsequently, the decade was pretty much on auto-pilot – while the paths of that group assembled in the common area of DPS hostel pretty much diverged with few intersections, life for me mostly took a very predictable course – get into an IIT, spend four years training to be an electrical engineer, ditch the training almost entirely in the first job out of college, and by the time you become stable enough to count for someone during your first job, jump ship again for business school. Although arguably it could be said in hindsight that this moving around was kind of necessary to get to a position that the next decade might be more stable than its predecessor. Indeed, it is possible that given the circumstances of this decade, stability might have stood for stagnation.

Australia is now a team in decline while Spain are the current holders of both the Euro and World titles. Google has graduated from being a proper noun to a verb, and Web 2.0 is so omnipresent and all- encompassing that life before it seems kind of fuzzy and unreal.

Almost all the advancements in my own life through the decade, however, have been pretty much limited to academic and professional streams, a sort of very expected progression, hardly anything worth writing about. Almost as a wry reminder of that, 2010 itself was hardly an eventful year. I moved from one project to another professionally, one book to another in my literary pursuits, and pretty much stagnated otherwise. For some folks around me though, this year marked a significant change in their lifestyles, jobs, marital status and what-have-you, much more than in 2009. While I was happy for them, atleast the ones I care about, it did have me thinking for most of this last month.

I discovered some awesome Pakistani music through Coke Studio, restarted badminton after more than a year’s gap, cannot remember what happened after 10 on the first two nights of my company’s annual offsite, became an even bigger slave of my laptop, worked my ass off for most of the year, saw five flatmates come in and move out during the year, and got to know my friends slightly better. Of the above, I m mostly proud of just the first and the last. Books and movies and TV shows filled up whatever was left of waking hours. Yeah, I know, mostly I wouldn’t mind a life at this point of time.

Stability would probably be more a part of lexicon now than before. It has already started to pinch me at different forums, in entirely different contexts. I don’t have too many hopes from 2011. The best that I can say is (as I shamelessly ripped off from somewhere) – May this be the prime year for you just as number 2011 is! :)

Happy new year to anyone who cared to trot by!