Weekend (Movie,Work,Reading) - Now is it not Work Life Balance?

It was a very different type of a weekend. I mean I thought it would be one of those busy working weekends where I would spend better parts of the day articulating the business value of working with my employer to our clients. And it was with long hours on on the phone and endless staring at the PowerPoint presentation slides. "Honestly did u do the MBA to sign up for this?" My dad asked me when I told him my weekend plans and to which I had no answer (although a voice in me told me Yes but I did not want to admit).

These days it is really amazing how work follows us everywhere(laptop + blackberry = 24 x 7 at work). I spent the better half of Saturday morning watching the juvenile slapstick comedy "Ajab Prem ki Gazab Kahani". The less I talk about the film the better it is and in case you have watched it you would hopefully agree. Anyways so I missed the final 20 minutes of the movie(not that I even regret it) thanks to meeting I had to join a teleconference. I frantically searched for a place to join the meeting and did so finally from the relative silence of Landmark. It is in times like these one realises how difficult it is to find some place quiet in India. Anyways as fate would have it, I spent close to an hour on the phone and my friend (with whom I had the movie and lunch plan) got utterly bored going around checking out new books and ended up buying a couple. As I was coming out of the store, I saw the new novel by Chetan Bhagat and picked it up...I had not read since I came back from my eventful Kolkata pujo trip a month back.

So there I was working through the rest of Saturday and through a lazy Sunday morning. So post lunch today I decided to take a break and opened the book. And I finished it in 3.5 hours flat. 2 States is a really good read. It depicts the complexities of making a love story work and taking it to a love marriage in the context of complex Indian society and family structures....Ahhh doesn't it sound familiar? Anyways it has a very nice feel to it something similar to Five Point Someone which was his first work. The characters are real and you can almost relate to them as soon as you get to see their world.

The real achievement of Bhagat is that the book has incidents which each of us have faced in life. Emotional turmoil, relating and understanding people, dealing with expectations of families are all so familiar things of everyday life. Apart from the storyline and the inherent message, I really liked an incident in the book where the male protagonist speaks about the emotional burdens of the past to a Guruji in Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. The Guruji advises that one needs to let go of the past burdens of pain, anger, frustration, guilt whatever it might be to be able to make a fresh start. It is not easy but if we do not do it our current and future life can get very very muddled up. I guess even a light read as 2 States has some points that make you ponder about your own life, your own experiences.

Change is the way of life. The answers to any situation we are faced with are always inside us. The key is to have the right ear and the right mind to listen.