Gauravonomics Diary

Welcome to Gauravonomics Diary! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!

I have a tendency to try to do ten things at the same time, when most others would only attempt three. This means I fail as often as I succeed.

While it may seem from my bio that I have never really failed, the reality is that I have failed far too many times to remember.

The first two decades of my life were littered with failures so serious that my father told me that he was scared that he’ll have to provide for me for life and my girlfriend asked me how I’ll provide for her if we were married (another girlfriend asked me the same question less than two years back).

At my IIM Bangalore interview, I forgot where I was and talked for a full five minutes about why IIM Kolkata was the perfect business school to study marketing.

At Tata Motors, I think my boss was the only person who really liked me. Everyone else only tolerated me because I put in long hours, negotiated ruthlessly, and got things done.

Some of the cool digital marketing initiatives I led at Tata Motors on Indica V2 Xeta and Indica Vista (also see) almost didn’t happen, at least on the first attempt.

I have always described myself as an atheist, but like everything else with me, my atheism has been angst-ridden. I thought of myself as an atheist not because didn’t want to believe in God, but because I wanted to, and couldn’t.

I grew up in a rather religious family. There was a prayer room in my grandparents’ house in Munger and both Ma and Baba prayed for at least an hour every morning. I remember standing outside the prayer room as a small child, waiting for my grandparents to step out and hand me the prasad. Even my parents had a small wooden temple in their house in Patna and my father would fold his hands and stand in front of it for half a minute before leaving for work every morning. When we had visitors, we took them to the big Hanuman temple near the railway station. When we traveled to another city, we visited all the famous temples. We watched Mahabharat and Ramayan on Doordarshan (and I read all the Amar Chitra Katha comics). We celebrated all the Hindu festivals. We cheered when the VHP activists demolished the mosque at Ayodhya.

I’m a big believer in the idea of being your truest self. When your thoughts and actions are aligned with your truest desires and motivations, you become authentic, even WYSIWYG. By bringing your whole self in sync with itself, you unlock the power within you to accomplish what you wish for, become, let’s say, your fullest self.

The only problem with being your truest self is that there are multiple selves within you –

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

– and your truest self is often not your best self.

Your truest self is the sum total of your past, your best and worst moments, your biggest triumphs and your most abject failures. Your truest self is like a difficult lover; it’s the self that you most love and most loathe, because it’s the self that’s most you, with all your potential and all your imperfections. It’s easy to become a slave of your truest self because it’s easy to forget that even though your truest self is the sum total of your past, it’s only one of your possible future selves.

It has been one year since I made my 30 by 30 list –

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.

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!

I first broke you into two,
Then neglected you for months,
Before ‘breaking’ you again,
In a Wordpress upgrade that went wrong.

To add insult to injury,
I have a second mistress now,
In addition to my first;
Between them, they almost own me.

But you remain my first love,
Dear Diary, and I often think of
The headiness I felt when
I first fell in love with you.

In short, I miss you much,
Even yearn for you at times.
So, if you let me, I’ll try
To make it up to you.

You’ll be my muse and
I’ll write once more, woo you
With poem, story, or essay;
If you let me, that is.

At the beginning of every year, I use a simple test to measure how well I have done in the previous year. I ask myself if the previous year was the best year of my life so far.

I asked myself this question first in 2001, and after that, for five years in a row, the answer was “yes”. Every year, from 2001 to 2005, was the best year of my life! Imagine that! It felt as if everything I wished for was within my reach; all I had to do was to ask for it and it would be mine. It felt as if every possibility was like a low hanging fruit; all I had to do was to raise my arm and pluck it. My life changed in those five years; I was literally transformed into a new man.

Then, the bubble burst. I had two difficult years in a row. Suddenly, nothing was easy anymore. In fact, the harder I tried, the more difficult it became. Every important aspect of life — love, work, money, health — came to a standstill, or, devolved. I felt frustrated at work, didn’t save any money, broke my heart twice, ignored my interests, ate junk food and put on weight.