When I moved into my new house last December, I was delighted. It’s a beautiful house overlooking the sea, walking distance away from office, in the costliest residential address in India. In fact, it’s such a lovely house that it was featured in a Mid-Day story on cool bachelor pads.
It would have been easy for me to look at the house as a symbol of how far I had come in life, especially in the context of where I had started from.
Instead, I remembered this paragraph from page 186 of Po Bronson’s life-changing book What Should I Do with My Life?, in which “boom wrangler” Heidi Olson explains her wanderlust —
I decided to go to Oxford for a year, because, well, it was Oxford. I told the other women at work, and one said, ‘I wish I could just up and go to Oxford.’ So I asked, ‘Why don’t you?’ She said, ‘I would, but I bought a couch.’ I always remembered that moment, and I never wanted to be that woman. I never wanted to be trapped by my past, my belongings, my commitments.