It was a red letter day of the wrong kind last week. I flunked an exam for the first time in my life. Throughout my life, even when I have appeared with no preps whatsoever I have never failed an exam. I have been long-listed in personal interviews. But a written exam? I have never failed in one. So much so I had come to believe that it was my birthright of sorts to pass exams!
It was a professional exam, a tough one at that. I had no time to prepare thanks to my heart beating incessantly for the cause of entrepreneurship, like Mandela's must have for South Africa or Mahatma Gandhi's for India. Well I am exaggerating. But you get the picture, right?
But those are not the chickens coming home to roost. It was my emotional excesses of the past year that seem to have also contributed in large measure.
And no less a person than Lakshmi, my wife, cottoned on to that. So when I mentioned to her the result, for the first time in our married life she reprimanded in no ambiguous terms. She attributed the failure squarely to what she believes was, and continues to be, my misplaced affinities and the way they have distracted mw. And that I was paying the price for neglecting my own professional priorities.
I cannot fault her. I believe there is more than a grain of truth in her rant. Given that I seem to have flunked by a whisker it is possible to argue that if I had channelized my energy to the exam preps instead of losing myself in discovering non-attainable, if not non-existent, relationships I may just have picked up enough marks to have cleared the damn paper.
And it is not just her anger that is killing. It is the realization that it will mean all the loss of time and money before I hit the road again that is just as smothering. And that is if I muster the courage to appear for it again, which I may not as far as I can see now.
At the end of it I feel all worn out now - my inability to manage the many demands on my life, my atrophying brain, my emotional indiscretion and what not. I should not and cannot add Lakshmi's anger to that list. She has been a patient Griselda all these years. Her anger and my failure that triggered it are just part of the chickens coming home to roost.
I pray to the Almighty to give me the good sense to come out of it all, pick myself up and move on, leaving that exam and its pursuit behind and just focus on what I seem ordained to do - run NSRCEL like the bureaucrat that I am.
Nanni....Namaskaaram...
It was a professional exam, a tough one at that. I had no time to prepare thanks to my heart beating incessantly for the cause of entrepreneurship, like Mandela's must have for South Africa or Mahatma Gandhi's for India. Well I am exaggerating. But you get the picture, right?
But those are not the chickens coming home to roost. It was my emotional excesses of the past year that seem to have also contributed in large measure.
And no less a person than Lakshmi, my wife, cottoned on to that. So when I mentioned to her the result, for the first time in our married life she reprimanded in no ambiguous terms. She attributed the failure squarely to what she believes was, and continues to be, my misplaced affinities and the way they have distracted mw. And that I was paying the price for neglecting my own professional priorities.
I cannot fault her. I believe there is more than a grain of truth in her rant. Given that I seem to have flunked by a whisker it is possible to argue that if I had channelized my energy to the exam preps instead of losing myself in discovering non-attainable, if not non-existent, relationships I may just have picked up enough marks to have cleared the damn paper.
And it is not just her anger that is killing. It is the realization that it will mean all the loss of time and money before I hit the road again that is just as smothering. And that is if I muster the courage to appear for it again, which I may not as far as I can see now.
At the end of it I feel all worn out now - my inability to manage the many demands on my life, my atrophying brain, my emotional indiscretion and what not. I should not and cannot add Lakshmi's anger to that list. She has been a patient Griselda all these years. Her anger and my failure that triggered it are just part of the chickens coming home to roost.
I pray to the Almighty to give me the good sense to come out of it all, pick myself up and move on, leaving that exam and its pursuit behind and just focus on what I seem ordained to do - run NSRCEL like the bureaucrat that I am.
Nanni....Namaskaaram...
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