Toasts to all.....

Sometimes, when life stares you on your face and you refuse to blink half the battle is won.

Mad I might have been, unmanageably obdurate most of the time, and yet it is that stubbornness which makes a person incompatible that makes him or her fight it out for dear life when everything and everybody else seems far away.

With that perspective, which is not a stand openly bolstering intransigence of all kinds, let be begin! Those who are, have been and had been close to me know I will use my characteristically quaint expression to describe 2010: it has just been that kind of year and there are of course no complaints.

Well, hang on… this post has not built up just yet but something I wanted to write nevertheless.

The year of the ten as I called it is coming to an expected break in a matter of eight days and it is one of those years I will look upon with fondness and nostalgia on the one hand and a bit of reservation and caution on the other.

For never before in the last twenty-two years have I been treated by life to a palate of moods from all seasons. But then what has to be has to be…

Getting into real life seems a whole lifetime away now that I look at it, and for that matter so does the middle of July, or for that matter the end of July and the coming August Days. Before I know it, it must rank routinely or distinguishably as special too as I breeze through different intensities and decibels but without ever appearing to endeavor to do so.

And am sure, it is in the almost unconcerned passage of time that I will find some of the finest lessons during the course of the coming year.

The consequence also is that the passage of time highlights my own changes, some positive, some negative, others neutral.

The lessons have been vast and varied, the modes through which they have been imparted different and even their relevance probably bearing their own differentials. Yet getting deep into each of them and interpreting them to the last detail is some time, I figure, a futile effort, a waste of time and perhaps life itself.

That is probably the greatest of lessons I have taken from the course of the year - to go on when the tide is high, go on when it is low, go on when there is actually nothing exciting or goading, to, simply, go on. After all why would "no matter what life goes on" become a cliché if it did not have even a grain of truth in it?

Some wonderful ties have been severed; some strands strained and on more than one occasion even the people who have been part of them departed forever. (I guess inevitability dictates better than indispensability, the latter at best a passing assumption).

As always in those cases "it is the tomorrows" - the days after the setbacks that have truly tested what I am truly made of.

Now others have come in - some new and some who have chosen to exorcise the indifferent silences of the past to be with me during my life's darkest and most important hours.

But make no mistake about it there are no replacements in life for meetings and partings are not so preordained in a way to fill previous gaps.

The fanatical pragmatic friendships founded during the last four years were Prashant, Naresh, Ron, Swaroop, and Aroop from earth's daylight crust. All superb human beings who had the ability to make each one of us or for that matter all of us laugh together.

It has been their year in mine as much as it has been my own. Yet I look upon my past and those who belonged to it too with greater maturity than I have over the last few months and with more than a tinge of gratitude.

To names that come to mind and those that don't let this be the message: people who enter my life hardly leave it except in physical form, and are hardly ever completely forgotten.

Toasts to all!