Cross-posted as a guest-post on Melody’s blog.
The voice in my head is telling me that it’s time to begin a new life.
As I move into a new role at work, in a new financial year, almost thirty months away from my thirtieth birthday, my thoughts turn to the questions I have often asked myself –
- What is the purpose of my life?
- What do I really want to do with it?
- What will I leave behind when I’m done?
As always, I don’t have answers to any of these questions. I don’t know the purpose of my life, or what I want to do with it, or what I’ll leave behind when I’m done. What I do know is that I haven’t done enough with my life, not nearly enough.
Sometimes, I think of a fat, ugly, awkward twelve year old boy I once knew. He studied in a Hindi-medium government school at one godforsaken end of Patna, read Chacha Choudhary comic books in Hindi, and struggled to put together one sensible sentence in English. He wore thick glasses in a cheap plastic frame, hand-me-down ill-fitting too-short shorts, and white-and-blue rubber slippers from Bata. He watched Chitrahaar on Doordarshan and third grade Hindi movies on a black and white TV with his parents. He sucked at sports, stammered when he spoke to girls and was bullied by his classmates for being the teachers’ pet. That totally pathetic boy was me.
If you had told me then that, fifteen years later, I’ll have the life I have today, I would have looked at you blankly. Because I couldn’t have understood your English, or comprehended the world you were describing to me, or imagined how I would ever become the person you were telling me about. But I have become who I am, and, sometimes, I’m as bewildered by it as that boy would have been. Sometimes, I think that there’s enough in there for a book already, in my journey from that world to this. But, sometimes, I feel that I’m, in fact, standing in one place, staring at the hourglass that is my life running out of time.
So, I have decided to do more with the time I do have; the result is a list of thirty things I want to do before I’m thirty. The interesting thing about my 30 by 30 list is that every single thing on it looks impossible today. As impossible as being ‘the man I am’ would have looked to ‘the boy I was’ fifteen years ago. I’m putting the list up on my blog, on the 30 by 30 page, and will post about my progress on a weekly basis. In the worst case, I’ll give up on the list in a few weeks. Even if don’t, I’ll probably be able to do less than ten things on the list by the time I’m thirty. But, if I do manage to do all thirty, what a story it will be! So, even though I know that the odds are impossible, I’m doing it anyway, because, never again in my life, will I be young enough, or foolhardy enough, to even try something as insane. And, maybe, as I try to find ways to do these thirty things, I’ll also find the answers I’m looking for, by trial and error.
So, finally, without further ado, in no particular order, here are the thirty things I want to do before I am thirty –
- Publish a novel.
- Publish a best-selling management book.
- Publish an anthology of my poems.
- Publish a travelogue.
- Write a movie screenplay.
- Write a weekly column for a national newspaper.
- Host a talk show on TV.
- Put up a play at Prithvi Theatre.
- Put up an exhibition of my photography.
- Take Gauravonomics into the Technorati Top 100 list.
- Start my own web startup.
- Start my consulting practice.
- Teach at an IIM as a guest lecturer.
- Buy a house on Worli Sea Face.
- Buy a second weekend house in the mountains.
- Have assets of more than a crore.
- Run the full marathon.
- Climb to the Everest Base Camp.
- Scuba dive in the Egyptian Red Sea.
- Take a river cruise down the Amazon.
- Take a month off to backpack through Europe.
- Take a month off to drive around North America.
- Travel to at least thirty countries I haven’t visited before.
- Live in Europe for at least three months.
- Watch all the movies in the IMDb Top 250 Movies list.
- Read all the novels in the Time Magazine 100 Best English Novels list.
- Learn French and watch all of Francois Truffaut’s movies, without the subtitles.
- Learn Italian and watch all of Federico Fellini’s movies, without the subtitles.
- Learn Spanish and watch all of Pedro Almodovar’s movies, without the subtitles.
- Date Sushmita Sen.
Do bookmark my 30 by 30 page and return to see how I’m doing.
