Inconvenient truths I am forced to live with

        1.  My two best friends in life are Liverpool supporters. Try as hard as I may to make my peace with this galling fact, their resolute love for Manchester United’s greatest rivals leaves more than just a sour taste in my mouth every time results go their way. I have lived through quite a few defeats at Anfield, not to mention suffered the smug looks on their faces in the immediate aftermath. Although my team has been infinitely more successful than theirs during our lifetime, savouring that success is just not the same without the good grace of Damu and the Kid.                       

       2.  I have been an abject failure academically. Not only did it take me a year more than I’d have liked to reach this place, I have also floundered with alarming frequency in the hallowed examination halls of the Department of Dreams. That I could not unleash the accrued consummation of my powers into either the Joint Entrance Exam or the Branch Change will forever rankle. The cataclysmic decline in grades that followed leaves me in an uncomfortable position that friends and foes alike fall short of fathoming. Mother’s constant reminders of opportunities gone begging act as a further harbinger of doom.

3.  I am past the legal marriageable age now. But never before was I farther away from undergoing the complex transformation of coupling. All these years have provided ample evidence of the disgruntling fact that no young damsel would have me. Or have anything to do with me at all, in some cases. One could say that outlandish rumours about me not being the straightest of arrows around have contributed in some way towards tarnishing my image as a tamer of women. Not that anybody believes I was much of a Casanova to begin with. I am staring at the possibility of chronic bachelorhood here. It bothers me that my plight doesn't seem as bothersome as it used to once.

      4.  I am a year older than most of my batch-mates in college. Hell, I am a year older than he who refuses to shut up. A ridiculous state of affairs that I cannot do anything about. It is in times like these that I find solace in the company of Messrs Das, Anand, Shubham and Tau. This injustice can only be set right once we are all toothless septuagenarians, when the difference of a year or two would be about as apparent as mud in an unmuddied lake.

 5.  Watch Out is no more in my life. R will not be the same without Senate Steps, formatting and issue-chapos to look forward to. My evenings will be rather meaningless, and bakar with Deep, Krownoz and Haaris rather mundane without the future of the magazine to worry about. It aggrieves me to think what a gaping hole this retirement is going to leave in my life.