Does everyone’s life start and end like this?

[Curtains open.]

Life starts. When you are a kid, your parents send you to school; expect you to score really well in your board exams so that you get a seat in a good university. Your parents will be skeptical if you tell them you wanted to take up say singing/painting/cricket as your profession without getting a bachelors degree. Once you pass out from college, you are expected to be employed with a good multinational company (thankfully the govt... sectors are out of fashion these days).

[Early 20’s]

You work passionately during the first couple of years, learning your way through the industry, seeing the world in a different light, with a rising energy within you to change the things which you feel can make the world around you a better place. You have that strong urge to take certain idealistic decisions which you know can make a lot of great things happen. If not to succeed you want the satisfaction of the fact that at least you tried. You know you are different from the rest of the world. You are unique!

[Late 20’s]

In the very middle of this exciting journey your parents will expect you to get married and “settle down” . Imagine what might happen if you want to take a radical career decision at this point in your life, that which you were really passionate about doing. Of course the response from the people around you would be definitely negative. In due course you are married and poof all of a sudden you are in a world of responsibilities.

[Early 30’s]
You have a wife now, so both of you need a house. But you have a stupid salary of 20,000/= a month, so you go for the easiest solution, you take a house loan. Pretty soon than you think it can happen, your sweet wife will spot the latest cool car on the block. Yes you have a car loan, and you buy that cool car to make your sweetheart happy! Now you are a happily married couple with a car and a house, so what’s missing eh? Yup, you want kids, and after that happens you have a complete family to take care of. Now you are paying loans, paying insurance premiums, sending children to school and dropping your wife to office. You come in the night after a day’s stressful work to read your favorite best seller after dinner, and all you are thinking of is whether you have paid your electricity and phone bills. You keep thinking of where all to put your savings to make the most of your monthly pay slip.

[Late 30’s]

No sooner, you are all of a sudden just another person around the block, with all the cool ideas you had buried way down in a pile of responsibilities. You look back and see, if only you would not have taken that one decision, how different your life would have been today. But alas, it’s too late! It’s just another life now!

[Curtain falls]