It is never too late to learn.

I learned to cycle at the age of 24. Shocker, eh?

God knows what crazy looks I get every time I slip this little factoid into casual conversation. Apparently, most people around me had learned to cycle as little children, some even before they could say 'mamma' or 'papa'. Indeed, one had learned to cycle even while still inside the womb. I have rather interesting friends, don't I?

On the other hand, one of the funniest stories I've ever told is of the time I tried to learn to cycle as a kid but failed, only to give up completely. But a decade later, I received a letter that said my career, and indeed life thereon, depended on how well I could wield the two-wheeled monster. Isn't fate a cruel mistress?

I cannot but admit I was hesitant to learn at this age. I mean I could vividly remember all the pitiful glances I'd get on the streets when I was learning to drive, with a big red 'L' stuck to the front and back of my dad's old car. After much effort and embarrassment, and with the help of my lovely friend Sharmishtha, I gained confidence and started to drive on a one-kilometre stretch inside my university and park confidently without having to call for help. But one day, as I was driving back from class, I panicked on a narrow stretch of un-cemented road and ran full throttle into a tree. I also hit a guy returning on foot, to avoid whom I had originally swerved. All the confidence I'd gained over weeks went down the gutter in those few moments. I never tried my hand at driving again, partially due to fear and partially because I seldom had the chance thereafter (the poor old car was wrecked and I went away to study further).

It was in mid-2016, while I was pursuing my PG as a Young India Fellow, that I was told I'd have to learn to cycle to pass a fitness test for my first job in Bombay. I was angry, I was scared. I had lost all my bearings. Even so, I half-heartedly set about looking for help. For days, I'd approach anyone I met with only one question: Can you teach me how to cycle? A few of them agreed to help, but plans to start my lessons never materialised. When I finally did try my hand, the fear of letting my feet leave the ground and balance the bicycle on my own proved too much for me to conquer.

I was back again where I had been ten years ago - I had a cycle, I had people who wanted to help me learn, but I couldn't let go of my fear of falling and getting hurt. I was bound by my own demons.

It was a difficult time, those few weeks. I'd almost given up on ever being able to balance on two wheels. But then, one evening, my closest friends - Hargun, Nikita, and Malika - decided to take things into their hands and dragged me out to the cycle stand on campus. Hargun even called in the big guns, Ishan and Shravan - our beloved friends from the university program team. They began my lesson with a motivational talk on learning to trust and letting go of the ground. It was an ordeal for each one of them, I could see. The guys even had cuts and bruises on their hands by holding the bike handles and running with me - but I like to believe they needed the exercise as much I did.

I was in the company of loving, caring, and encouraging people who had made it their personal mission to help me conquer my fears. If I didn't succeed, I'd be letting each of them down. And I couldn't possibly have done that! Within the next twenty-five minutes, I was riding around like Fearless Nadia on a yellow bicycle, a wide grin on my face even as the wind hit me hard. I was told to take it slow, to be careful, but I kept cycling around campus as if I had just been freed from a cage.

I had never felt so free, so mobile, so... empowered.

I'd conquered my biggest and perhaps my only fear, and one that had plagued me since I was a little kid.

While I have my friends to thank - all five of them - for making me do this and bearing with me till the end, I also learned a big lesson through the entire ordeal: that it is never too late to learn new things. It is never too late to conquer your fears. And it is never too late to learn to let go.

* * *

This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda.

A misplaced idea of love

A mistaken sense of belonging

A misplaced idea of love

Is it real, what I perceive as mine?

Who am I? Where do I belong?

Finding comfort in pages and words

Impervious to faces, voices, and noises

Am I estranged from the world?

Or am I lost to my mind?

Here today, gone tomorrow

Transience has been me eternally

Memories plague me, certainty evades me

How long will I live in ivory towers?

A beating heart, a twitching ear

An insomniac's urge to run

They ask, what is out there?

What beckons me to fly?

Flitting between physical spaces

No semblance of ground in sight

Have I left home forever?

Or am I homeward bound?

On the trail of a place under the sun

I've lost track of where I come from

Will anything ever tie me down?

Is there no cornerstone I will find?

And in the wake of every flight

In my heart will I always find

A mistaken sense of belonging

A misplaced idea of love?

© Mahima Kohli 2016

Stepping out into the world.

My life is cliched and I make no bones about it. I am your typical Delhi-born, Delhi-bred girl. My schooling was completed here, and so was my undergraduate degree. So many of my friends left for other cities, some went abroad as well. I managed to get admission in one of the city's best colleges. And so, I stayed home. In many ways, it was a good thing too. No financial burden on my parents, more valuable time spent in my beloved city of birth, and of course, gharwalon ka pyaar. 

But by the time I turned 21, I had started craving adventure. Independence. I longed to be on my own, to carve a niche for myself in the outside world. I wanted my cliched life to change. I longed to step out of the warm cocoon of family living and fend for myself. I was already earning enough, through tuitions and freelance writing, to cover my expenses. It was just the lack of opportunity to experience the world on my own, unencumbered, unfettered, that bothered me. And I found myself to blame. I could have worked harder and secured admission in a college outside of Delhi, like so many other friends did. If not, I could also have dropped a year after school to try again. But I had no patience anymore. So I settled for the next best thing, which was unfortunately in the same city. 4 more years of sheltered home life thus got etched onto my life's scroll.

In the last semester of my engineering, I eventually realized I wanted to become a civil servant. It had been my mother's life wish ever since I'd been a kid. Not mine though. I kept avoiding having to think about it all my life. I told her I don't like the prospect of being an IAS officer, working amidst hundreds of government files, becoming a 9-to-5 servant of the system. And yet, when the time came and I had to decide where my life goes from here, I chose the one thing I had always given least preference to. The one and only thing my mother always thought was made for me. You cannot imagine her surprise, her boundless joy, at being told of my career choice!

So I sat for the UPSC prelim exam alongside my end semester exams. And I cleared it. Five months to the main exam - the one people take a year and a half to prepare for - and I had absolutely no clue what to do. I was still living at home; I'd go to the neighbourhood library to study. But the exam I was appearing for required much more concentrated study and a strategic approach. It seemed certain I won't make it that year, and I had all but resigned to this realization.

And then the miracle happened.

One of my teachers heard that I had made it, and offered me the unsolicited advice that changed my life. He asked me to move to Jamia Millia Islamia to prepare for the main exam. As I learned from him that afternoon, the university was running a residential coaching program for IAS aspirants and I could get in, now that I had cleared the prelim exam. I was skeptical at first, but he convinced me. I in turn convinced my mom, and within a week, on the 21st of August 2013, I moved into a hostel room at Jamia and began my studies anew. Never having lived away from home for this long before, everyone expected me to be homesick or at least take some time to adjust. But voila! It came completely naturally to me. Friends in the hostel assumed I was a seasoned hosteler. Whenever I'd mention that I live in Delhi and this is a first for me, they'd be shocked. I settled in like this was what I was meant for.

I credit my moving away from home as the ultimate game-changer in my life. Don't get me wrong; I am not a deviant who was craving to get away from home to unleash her wild side, or something. But I strongly believe that people only discover themselves when they get out on their own. Buy their own groceries, wash their own clothes, clean their rooms on their own. Interact with people on their own terms, learn to live in a diverse community, and to handle situations single-handedly if need be. It teaches you courage, independence and self-reliance. And it often brings out the best in you. While in the hostel, I met some really great people, learned to study on my own, realized the joys of disciplined living and of doing my own chores. I also got a lot of time to myself and it helped me put my life back into perspective.

Foremost, I understood the importance of family as the strongest support system. It is only when you're away from them that you realize, whether distant or close by, they are always indispensable to your life. But moving away from them is also often necessary for you to truly find yourself. I am grateful for having got the opportunity to start a new life when I most needed it. I wish everyone would get the blessing of a new start at least once in their lives.

Don't give up on Life. Not yet.

It isn't very frequently that one comes across a useful link or thought on one of the various pages one has liked on Facebook. It's mostly rage comic strips (which are really funny, by the way), crappy jokes, political debates, or appeals to 'like' another equally crappy page or to share silly content. You know the drill, because admit it, you do it too. Every single day.

But sometimes epiphanies happen. So, right around the time when I was having a real hard time putting up with depressing and pessimistic people all around me, a link sprang up on my timeline today that made me want to share it with one and all. You see, I've been wanting to write about something that I really feel strongly about but haven't been able to make the time. And this certain article I am sharing is a small embodiment of what I want to tell people.

28 Signs You’re Wasting Your Youth

People today are literally wasting their lives doing nothing but fret and over think. I agree, thinking before you leap is the right safer strategy to go about taking most decisions in life. But over-thinking, drawing out pessimistic scenarios in your head and giving up on hope just because luck did not favor you earlier in life and you fear it never will, isn't exactly how one is supposed to be leading her/his life at a young age. Heck, it isn't how one is supposed to live her/his life EVER. The day you start over thinking and giving up on things is the day you become old and useless. Take it from me, you won't achieve half of what your mettle is worth, just because you fear the result.

People talk about theists and about atheists. So many friends of mine are sworn atheists. They might not scoff at the Almighty, but they do not believe in Him either. So what do they believe in, I ask. Themselves and their hard work, they say. And yet, when they do not achieve what they work so hard for, they blame it on luck. I am not a prophet, nowhere even close, and I do not know whether luck/destiny/fate exists and how one defines it, but I believe in that higher power which determines what one gets in life and when the time is right for that. My belief definitely does not guarantee His existence, neither shall I claim it does. But this belief keeps me going. This one single belief keeps me happy inside, satisfied that the reins of my life are in better hands and that all I'm supposed to do is to go with the flow, live my life in the best way I can with what I have right now, and to always believe that everything that happens or comes to me is for the good. And my belief has never failed me. Every time I've been through a very trying time, I've emerged out knowing that I'll be fine. And in hindsight, it's always given me loads of valuable lessons and experiences I cherish. And I've always got more in life than I've expected to get. Maybe because I deserved every bit, or maybe because I was 'lucky'.

But the fact that I claim to get most of what I wish for in life doesn't mean I don't have hardships. My life has more troubles and insecurities than most people my age can't handle. They succumb. Time and again I have been on the verge of doing that too. And that's when my belief sustained me, kept me afloat, gave me hope that times will change. And they did. They always change. For everyone, irrespective of how 'unlucky' they've been in the past or how privileged or unprivileged they are. It's the perspective that distinguishes between the ones who're living a life and the ones who are just breathing. It's what you choose to focus on that determines how you look at your life. If you focus on past failures and misfortunes and make them the basis for your present decisions and opinions, the future has no reason to look up and shine upon you. If you are thankful instead for all the times you've had success, for all those big and small joys you've cherished and for the very fact that you're alive, literate and able to access the technology that lets you read these words, I'd say you're better off than a lot of your fellow human beings. Isn't that reason enough to be happy?

Lack of a job, relationship problems, insecurities about not being as successful as you'd wish to be or of not living up to people's expectations - these aren't as big concerns as they're made out to be by the youth today. For all I know, five or maybe ten years down the line you'll probably have a job befitting your capabilities, a pay packet enough to at least sustain you, a better half to lead your life with or else the realisation that you're better off without one, and loads of maturity and experience. I say 'probably' here, not 'definitely'. Because there are always those few who fail to make use of whatever talent they have, remain unsettled or get dejected with life only to kill themselves or lead a loser's life with nothing but alcohol or drugs for company and consolation. But whoever is reading this is sure to scoff at this probability and claim that this can never happen to them. Now that's what I'm talking about. That's confidence in yourself. Where's it gone? Why hide it away inside? Have some faith - in your own capabilities, in fate or luck or destiny (whatever!). Know that no matter what, things always make out a way of settling down for the good. You will ultimately have all you want, or maybe little less, but who cares, as long as you know how to be HAPPY? Isn't that what we're all working towards in life - happiness and contentment? So if you're happy with what you get, in the hope of being able to do better in the future, where's any reason for dejection and hopelessness in this world? All it takes is a bit of hope. The tiny bit of hope that comes with a droplet of water falling from the skies can bring a smile to an emaciated farmer's lips, no matter whether rains follow or not. Why then are we so scared of hope? Why are we so afraid of failing that we do not let hope take birth inside us?

Why can't we just go out there and do what it takes to achieve what we so desire, while also knowing that if success does not come in one attempt, there's always another attempt at it. Maybe even ten, but nothing is the end of the road. If something you wished for did not happen to you, it means something else is out there waiting for you to reach out for it. It isn't necessary that you will always be successful in the end. But where's the harm in hoping you are? If not, learn from the experience and move on to the next goal. Do not dwell on anything longer than it deserves. Do not give up on life just because some things aren't working out right. It isn't time yet. There are still miles to go before you sleep. Might as well make use of them to do something better than mope and curse!

Choices

There are always two alternatives
To every decision big or small
The choices we make at every step
Will define who we are and what we get.

There are two roads at every fork
Diverging towards different ends
It's the path we choose to take
That will seal the destiny we make.


One choice will be easy
One road smooth and straight
It'll promise you ephemeral pleasure
But not an end that you can treasure.

The other choice will be onerous
The road jittery and uphill
The pinnacle would however afford
You a key to a blessed world.

The weak of will and purpose
Will always find the first choice right
But the one who treads the easy way
Loses sight of the goal and goes astray.

The one with purpose and strength of resolve
Will however choose the road less traveled by
For only he who can overcome hassles great
Will build for himself a serene fate.