Knicq

Once upon a time, not very long ago, I used to be less than 30 years old; but it is a distant memory. I am not one to pay a lot of attention to the number that is age. My parents have always complained that I never act my age, or to put it more accurately act one of my ages for too many years to come. I have always seen that as my innate ability to stay evergreen. Green is good, we all know that. It is the best color for a passport, a flag, and one’s favorite cricket team. Parents know their children best and if mine thought I acted a certain age for ages, who was I to argue with them?

Personally, I have never been able to understand people who act or are able to conduct themselves as wise beyond their years. Where is the fun in that? Life permitting, we all grow up to be ‘beyond’ our years. Some of us even get to be wise. Why expedite the inevitable? It is the difference between chewing one’s food properly, or gulping it all down in a haste – which do you think is a healthy practice?

Let me not trick you into thinking that I ever got stuck in an age on purpose. Its just that I am like that. It is hard for me to move on, and some numbers were harder to move on from than others. There are remnants of some of those numbers still in me, and sometimes I wish I had some remnants of some other numbers. It would not hurt me for instance to have a little bit of the cocky confidence of the 21 year old knicq, or the ironclad convictions of the 18 year old knicq, or the hunger and drive of the 24 year old knicq, or even the sense of humor of the 29 year old knicq. Oh, 23 years and five months old knicq was just the right shape for two weeks as he transcended from celery to pear in no time. It wouldn’t hurt to be a more regular shape.

Unfortunately, though, the remnants that have refused to go are the ones I would rather have liked to see leave me. My lack of self-discipline is just as pronounced today as it was when I was 14, my blabbering is worse than it was at 13, my sporting inability has refused to let go of me despite the best of my efforts, my penchant for making a right fool of myself in front of people I really need to like me has never left me ever since I achieved perfection in it at 16. Lets not kid ourselves, there are always people who we need to like us. People we adore, admire, care for, or just plain love. When you are knicq, there are scores and scores of people who fall in any one or more of those categories. When you are knicq, you are always getting blessed with amazing, beautiful, and too good to be true-but true, people. Except the few who take it upon themselves to never let you forget how long ago it was that you turned 30…

Yes, there are those then. Not many, but a few. Privy to the intimate details of the drab drama that is knicq – the life, they use that information to their advantage and to my detriment – or to be more precise, to my self-esteem’s detriment. They are the friends who would lay their lives for you, and make you wish sometimes that they would get on with it and do so already. They are the friends who know just exactly how to wind you up, and never let their ability to do just that wane. They are the friends, who were not perturbed in the least when I put my new strategy to counter their morale-busting tactics; a strategy which had repeated proclamations of human greatness on my part as its cornerstone. An excellent strategy that should work on the premise that when someone is at his confident best, and refuses to even allow you to pull him down even when you remind him that one has been asked to leave by an ex-employer quite unceremoniously, that his next employer had not really been completely heart-broken or broke or both when he resigned, and that he has been un-employed, euphemistically self-employed, for over five months now. It backfired. All they had to do was ask me this: “So, even before you had got married, exactly how many expressions of interests did you have in you from the better half prospects?”

It should not have mattered. But it was meant to matter. It did.

Below the belt. Mean. Vicious. True.