The first day of the rest of my life.

As we grow older, we acquire the desire to be taken seriously. Happens around the age of 25. Almost certainly at the age of 25 every starlet wants to do a character role, every theater artist wants to do a comedy, and every long haired punk wants to cut his hair and get a job. That's the way we are built. So as I see my birthday approaching on the horizon, I am thinking - maybe, I should do something important in my life. Start my company, see the world, make some money.

Aha. Except on my 25th birthday I get to know that I am being promoted and sent to a new city heading a set of people, lots of responsibility, yadda yadda yadda. So my new job takes me all the way from Madras, TN to Hyderabad, AP where I am to fight the last battle for a completely decimated soft drinks company. And I thought to myself - fuck it ! This is brilliant. I can have fun doing this. And I carried on for another year of my life. And then the 26th birthday loomed ahead - It hit me like a train. I thought to myself, I am a grown-up now. An adult even. I want to get serious. I want to start a company. And since the only companies that seem to get started around me have things to do with computers, I thought, I should start by changing my job.

So I rang up my friends and apprised them of this epic decision. These friends however, were not bright. They took me seriously. They immediately set up these meetings for me. They rang me back a week later telling me, warning me, lauding me for the plunge I hadn't yet taken.

Somewhere along the line my dad's friend S gets in to the fray too. S works for a Staffing company, one of the largest in South Asia or so. S set me up for a meeting with R who was some hotshot head hunter for a software company H. That man again was not very bright. He also took the idea of me changing industries seriously.

So I am in a meeting with R and S, both having taken the idea of me being responsible seriously. In some weird way, it appealed to me. I was going to be 26. I wanted to be taken seriously. It was good. And R who was quite old yet quite sprightly, looks at me in that "I understand exactly how difficult it is to be doing what you are" as he shakes my hand.

And that's when R tells me the magic words. "X, this is very hard work. It is just you, your imagination and a computer. Are you really sure you can put the hours in?". And I gush eloquence. I was going to be 26 after all. And as my eyes bored in to R's cherubic little face, he crumbled. He made me an offer. And at that point of time I didn't even think it was a bad one.

The best part of the entire deal was that these people at H gave me money upfront. And I was like wow, this won't get me working. The bright lights in my head are now doing a musical. These people were willing to pay me money for doing something I have no idea about even before I had done any of the doing of it. The best I have ever been able to come up with to explain that was:

R wasn't very bright. Or that S was very good.

So two months later, I was in yet another new city, stars in my eyes, money in the bank and in front of a computer trying to figure it all out. And man, it was hard work. I had no idea.

I have never been the most motivated man in the world. Whenever, there has been work at hand to do, all the things I have to do in life seem so much more important. Its all very distracting. But this time around it was far worse. It was supposed to be just me, myself and the computer. But that was not strictly speaking true. My computer is attached to the Internet. And the Internet contains everything in the whole wide world ever. And I have always found everything in the whole wide a tad distracting.

This is where I probably tell you that I didn't get much work done that day, or the next, or the next after that.