Silver Jubilee

This post was supposed to be up this morning. But things haven't really turned out the way I've planned them today :) (and that is, probably, the first smiley on this blog)
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Conversation with a good-friend-at-the-bar (both bars):

"Dude, a review of my concert came in the Hindu Friday Review!"
"Kick ass, macha. What did it say?"
"He bambooed me here and there. But there was some encouraging references to 'interesting' and 'promise'..."
"How many years will you be promising, da?"
And we laughed.

It's a big number - twenty-five - a quarter of a century, one-fortieth a millennium (think about it - lay forty of my lives end-to-end, and you've covered everything from Allauddin Khilji to Facebook), silver jubilee and all that. It is also a small number - Sachin (and Javed Miandad before him) has played international cricket for nearly as long, wars have taken longer, and really, in the context of the cosmos and other large items, twenty-five years is nothing.

Let us get back to the main issue - my promise. [I have a vague philosophical doubt here - when someone shows promise, who is this promise made to? To the world at large? To specific people? To themselves? Anyway, irrelevant.]

Apparently, when I was a year-and-a-half old, I could identify fifty flowers in a book and tell their names. When I was four, I could recite some two hundred shlokas from memory. I'm sure my Amma saw a lot of promise at this stage. Lots of people who heard me sing as a kid said I had a great voice and all that - when I first started singing swarams and stuff, there was even talk of 'natural' and 'genius' and the dreaded 'promise'. When I was a kid, I was really good at mental arithmetic - I could multiply, add, subtract, divide large numbers without pen and paper. My teachers always thought I was smart because I'd come up with geometry proofs that weren't in the textbooks. Today, I'm introduced to people variously as a promising flautist, promising lawyer and a promising writer (the last one is a bit random, really - I've been a musician of some sort all my life, and associated with the law for seven years, but writing, apart from this blog, there isn't much at all).

Today, my memory only serves me in one useful way - I remember phone numbers (lots of numbers I know are not saved in any medium - only recollected when needed) and people (this is an embarrassing skill sometimes, because I know exactly who people are and they have no idea I know them). Otherwise, my memory is as normal as anyone else's. I can barely listen to myself sing anymore. True, I'm doing a lot with my music - but nothing to match that early 'promise', no signs of all that 'genius' people spoke about. I'm not confident of solving a quadratic equation today, although I'm sure minus-b-plus-or-minus-root-b-squared-minus-four-a-c-by-two-a will come in handy. I haven't written much at all - there are stray articles here and there, those short stories that appeared in vague magazines and newspapers, there's that aborted novel - nothing of note, really.

Which is why, on my twenty-fifth, today, I wonder if I will spend my entire life as a promising fellow and nothing more. Like Amol Muzumdar. Like Dinesh Ka(a)rth(h)i(c)k threatens to be. Hirwani. Kambli. People who were expected to become the next big things, but never did. Perhaps the pressure got to them, maybe their promise was miscalculated, they might not have worked hard enough, or they just weren't lucky.

I'm guilty of the first three, and I cannot comment on the fourth. Which is why I think it is time to spend my next quarter-century fulfilling this promise; not wholly, or in full measure, but very substantially; not to the world, or to my Amma, or anyone else, but to myself.

Happy birthday to me.
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(Apologies to people for slightly personal nature of post. Apologies to Jawaharlal Nehru for the plagiarism.

I share my birthday with Indira Gandhi, Sushmita Sen, Sonali Bendre, Jodie Foster, Zeenat Aman, Calvin Klein, Larry King, Arun Karthik Mohan. Today is also International Men's Day and World Toilet Day. I think we can safely assume that the latter was not invented by greeting card companies.)