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I read J K Rowling's commencement address at Harvard Alumni Association 2008. She talks about some beautiful themes therein. One of them is that there is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering your life in the wrong direction. The moment you are old enough to take the wheel the responsibility lies with you.

I feel I have taken the steering wheel.. am sitting in the car of my life and am just wondering where to drive out to. Ironically most of us pine for this moment when they will take the wheel coz they are just frustrated with someone else driving them around. Now that I have been in that moment for quite some time... I just don't know where to go. In a way I am missing the awareness that the responsibility lies with someone else... It was easy to just sit at the back and blame them for everything that din't happen as per expectations...

The full import of the word responsibility is coming home. I am responsible for my own life. I bear the consequences of decisions I make. Its amazing the number of people I see going back home then... not physically but emotionally and intellectually. Take H or M at office... H keeps saying... Its enough now I just wanna go home. Every single one wants to be closer home... No one in this so called high flying consulting firm talks about leaving India. And people wanna flock towards the base location... be it Delhi or Lucknow.

So I feel lost as I sense these lives whizzing past me on the race track of life... And I wonder where are all these people going? This gives me that nasty feeling of sitting on some kind of a time bomb... this uneasy feeling that time's just flying by with each passing day and what do I have to show for it?

Ok... So I have a job that pays the rent, for books and movies and phone calls. And how this is where I had dreamed of reaching just some time ago... And today I feel these standards are so damn external. It seems there is some internal standard... a voice that keeps coming back to you like an echo... doing rounds within. Something which says... Hey! but is this what I wanted to begin with? I thought so... but after reaching here it feels so different! It feels empty now. So maybe I need to come full circle and revisit the whole thing. Its a difficult voice to listen to coz mostly it tells me how cowardly or pathetic I am. Its brutally honest. It tells me where I have not lived up to my highest right. Its also tells me my strengths and leaves the decision of doing something basis this information to me. Everyone has this voice within. Some just manage to drown it in the cacophony of the worlds they build around them. I am hoping this voice within will never drown out and guide me. This will take me to where I need to go.

I am hoping I have solved a bit of the puzzle. For now at least! Still no clue on long term visions and directions etc... but like Martin Luther King said... you don't have to be able to see the whole staircase to be able to take your steps.