The Dreadfully Heavy Whites

I thought today evening that I'll write a post titled 'Defense of a Nerd', primarily because of a certain someone's relentless attack on my lack of things to do last night. However, something more pressing came up, something that might go out of my memory unless I put it down here. Here's the deal - this is about me!

A bunch of elderly neighbors came over for an evening gossip to my place. Then they got talking to my parents about me. This is fairly regular conversation when people who've not met me before - they get talking about the boards and all. Then, my dad took out a bunch of those newspaper clippings and showed those to them. In one of them, I'd talked about how I washed my own clothes. Honestly, I didn't remember till I got reminded today.

But when I was reminded, I could almost feel that dreadfully heavy whites (the DPS, RK Puram trousers) in my hands. I can remember waking up really early morning at 5 in the winter to go to school from Ghaziabad. But all that feels distinct. However, it gives me a sense of pride and a sense of self-esteem.

Now, success and failure come and go. Often, we sit down more with the failures than we do with the successes in life. But that bit of harsh living back in class 12th made me a bit resistant to failures. Yes, I do fail very often. But my entire response to failures has changed. I'm able to pick up the pieces and rather than move on, get back harder to the tast. Now, that might not be the best thing to do. Sometimes, it's just better to move on and let bygones be bygones. But these days, this is what I do and I'm happy doing it. Some day, I might realise that this is wrong and then I'll change myself accordingly. As I wrote in my last post, I'm not attached - even to my behaviour.

As a postscript, the earliest instances of this 'rising from failures' were my quizzing escapades in school. There have simply been too many quizzes that Kritika and I went for, and in each one of them we failed (to Kritika's credit, she won three quizzes - three times when she went without me in her team). But there was this 'big thing' lying in the future that kept making me get back to quizzing. I think that is why extra-curricular and co-curricular competitions are important. They teach you to deal with failures.

After this 'brief' thought, I'll get back to 'Defense of a Nerd' the next time.