Kick that Adjustment

Do you struggle every day morning to drag yourself from the bed for getting ready for your office? Do you feel sleepy while driving down to your workplace? Do you feel like not talking to anyone, even with your wife, once you are back from office in the evening? On Sunday evening do you feel bad that the weekend is gone? If answer to any two of these questions is ‘yes’, then there is another vital question for you. Are you just wasting your life in doing something which you don’t like, but you have to continue doing the same because there is no visible alternative?


I remember how elated I was when I bagged my first job in campus. I was thrilled to discover that I could buy my own cigarette. I was excited because I was no more to be labeled as an unemployed-educated youth. And then, unknowingly, I fell prey to adjustments. Adjustments with daily routine, demanding boss, less cooperative colleagues, targets, meetings, reviews, responsibilities without much authority….the list may go on. Once married, learnt adjustments with time share between wife and the boss who used to call me invariably after I reached home every day. And the saga continues. When I look back, every step of life seems to be some adjustment or other. Adjustment with time, food (no high calorie food, no frequent byriani), fashion (getting old, so no bright colour), habit (no cigeratte, no booze), TV shows (because children will not allow to see anything beyond nobita and doremon)…oh God, the list is unending.

So, one day, when I shall retire, I will have bag full of adjustments with me. Will I be living a life which will have no originality that time? I will forget how to fly a kite, I will forget how to smash in a shuttle game, I will forget how to look at the sky with open arms, I will forget how to blow a whistle, I will forget appreciating fresh beauties. Because adjustments will take away everything of my life.

Is this what we call living? Is living all about earning handsome salary, frequenting food joints, visiting malls and going to movie theatres? And then going to bed with heart full of adjustments? Hope you have seen the movie “Zindegi Na Milegi Dubara”. We can’t get whatever is dearest to our hearts, because we are afraid of getting that. We are afraid because we are so habituated with our adjustments that we tend to forget that something is there beyond it.

Then what? Change it or make another adjustment? Lets have some action points so that atleast at the end of the day we go to bed with some amount of personal accomplishment.

a) Lets spend atleast half an hour for ourselves. We will not even speak with anyone during that period. May be I will go through a book of interest. If I still like to read Amar Chitra Katha, I will do that during this time. I will purposefully not think of any responsibilities. This half an hour, I will be a teenager of 14 years.

b) Once in a week, I will go out alone for some time. I will do photography, I will pluck flower if I like. If I like to sit quietly by a lake during this time, I will do that alone.

c) Once in a week, I will eat whatever I like. Be it a slice of chocolate or a mug of beer. Other days will be there for restrictions. And if I break all rules for one day, hope my cholesterol level will not shoot up!

d) And above all, if possible, once in a year, I will go out for a trip with my friends. I will leave my mobile back.

e) And while I do all these things, I will never mind if my wife also does the same things.



Zindegi Na Milegi Dubara, lets all live it fully. Enough of adjustments, now its for me.