It’s like peeing in the pool (everyone has done it yet no one fesses up). Because we are so f*^king afraid of the judgment we never come clean. Let’s call, a spade a spade, gone are the days when to err was human and to forgive was divine. The new motto of the 21st century seems to be, ‘to err is human, to judge is divine.’
Admitting that we f*^ked up, is what I am talking about. It is indeed one of the hardest things that we have to do and more often than not we do without it.
When have you ever heard yourself saying these words, ‘so listen dude, here’s the deal. I f*^ked up. There is no one to put the blame on. There were no circumstances that led to it. I admit, I simply f*^ked up. Totally and completely, 100 percent my fault.’
Worse is when it comes to accepting our failures. Because failures as opposed to f*^k-ups are construed as somewhat more deliberate. It’s like that the world would have us believe that in case of a failure we purposely planted ourselves amidst the situation and did not just happen to be a victim of the circumstances. So you can wave goodbye to the word sympathy if you were expecting any. Now given all this you can only imagine the state of mind I must have been in when the people from my publishing house, who by the way had my novel on them for almost a year, told me that they were not going to go through with it.
“We have had a look at the manuscript and we are afraid we have decided against it as it doesn’t quite fit our list. We wish you good luck with your future endeavors,’ were the exact words I believe. In short what they meant was that my novel sucked.
In fairness to them, it did suck. It just took me long to realise that it did and even a lot longer to come to terms with it. I guess, I should have seen this coming though; my novel had ghosts and goblins involved for crying out loud. I don’t know it’s just that our whole Indian scenario doesn’t quite go with some wizard kid or the whole vampire thing. I mean what are the chances that you’d run into an elf named Varun Chopra in your basement.
Now to make matters worse I am not the brightest of the academic bulbs either. Forget getting great marks, I had much difficulty completing my degree of five years (which by the way took me six). And the cherry on top of this three tiered cake of a situation that my life has suddenly become is that I don’t even have a job. Yes, I am 24 and jobless. I don’t have a boyfriend and more often than not my decision making abilities bite me in the ass. I make the most pathetic choices and I take the worst decisions ever. My trainer at the gym (who FYI is a law graduate too), sees my frustration as a good sign because according to him when I am angry I work out with all that I have got, which anyway is bare minimal.
‘Don’t worry you will get a job. Your trainer did too,’ Dvd, my gym partner and one of the few people who have managed to get past the instinct to kill me in the past 6-7 years that he has known me, often does not hold back from sharing his pearls of wisdom.
Anyway it’s not about what Dvd says. The whole thing boils down to this that I am starting at the grass root level once again. I am bidding farewell to my novel (If not for water pollution I would have dumped its copy in the Sukhna lake to prove my point). Anyway I guess what I am trying to say is that I screwed up and I know there were some people who were expecting a lot from me and from this little adventure that I embarked upon almost three years ago. You guys, I am sorry that I couldn’t deliver and for the rest of you I am hoping you’d feel better knowing that there is someone who is far more hopeless than you could ever be.
There’s a load off my chest!
