It’s been more than 16 months since I wrote any post on this blog, it might have been the first year since 2010 when I hadn’t posted a single post but someone reminded me that I should write something, and here we are, the best thing I can think of was an honest reflection on the year that went by.
2021 was one of the most challenging years of my life, definitely not the worst though, but pretty challenging. In terms of worst
years it will still rank 3rd but owing to certain events towards the
ending months and the intensity of ‘being worse’ in the other 2 years, it
escapes that position despite me catching covid, dengue, losing close friends
and relative, seeing my close ones struggling with health and also my own
struggles to keep my startup afloat, the challenging and struggling life of an
entrepreneur, my own demons and many other. As many say, this was a year where
even a mere act of survival is enough to celebrate and pat on your back.
I started the year with a very high level of energy, highly
motivated to make my start-up a grand success, achieve peak fitness, write a
novel, start my own Instagram channel for poetry and Shayari and many other
grand plans. I also set various aspirations like I will work from Dalhousie for
a week, will travel to Japan as my first international travel, and many other
items on the bucket list. It felt like it will finally be the year of Mayank, a
year where I will rise from my relative obsolesce and sweep the entire country. A major success on both professional and personal levels. I aspired to have 50k+
followers on my start-up handles, 10k followers on my LinkedIn and Instagram
Channel, reach 15% body fat and 65 kg weight, and many other things that were
planned, except a few I failed to achieve most of the items.
Of course, I had the implicit condition apply that I won’t
be hard on myself, I won’t unnecessarily push my body, I won’t go beyond my
limits, I will calibrate the targets as and when needed. All this thinking
left me in a perpetual stage of toggling between high euphoria and high
existential crisis. On one hand, I wanted to be a superman achieving everything,
on the other, I was just struggling to justify the efforts I was putting in.
Will all these struggles, mental agony, hard work be worth it at all in the end
or not? Whether becoming a successful entrepreneur will make me happy or having 10k
followers on LinkedIn will make me happy or achieving 65 kg will make me happy, at times
I had no answers and I tend to drive myself more into the process in such
instances instead of more reflections.
There were weeks I was lying dormant just working the bare
minimum and thinking about my purpose on this planet and there were weeks I worked so
hard, I burnt myself physically and mentally justifying it as a need to keep my
venture alive and not being dishonest with my ambition and aspiration. There
were weeks I was struggling with bad physical and mental health and there were
weeks where I was burning 800 calories a day or walking 25k steps a day. There
were weeks of full gluttony and there were weeks of strict dieting. Too many
extremes, low and high, all in a year.
When the year started, I didn’t imagine I would be at this
stage right now. I was pretty sure either I would have achieved commercial
success with my venture or I would have quit already, my own tenacity and
persistence are surprising me. Also, when the year started I didn’t believe in
miracles or clichéd stories, but something happened with me which changed my
outlook towards life that miracles can happen with me also.
The month of January and February were pretty much stable, my co-founder and I were experimenting with our start-up offerings. My father retired in January and we had to brace ourselves for more financial adjustments. I also took a resolution of not eating any sweets (not no sugar) this year, which means no pastry, jalebi, gulab jamun, rasgulla for me for the whole year. I was looking forward to regaining my fitness routine and started exercising regularly. Overall, a very normal starting of the year.
Fast forward to March and covid cases were already
increasing, I used to regularly monitor the stats that is when it slowly
started spreading everywhere, in relatives, in neighbors, the numbers became
faces, faces I know and cared about. Still, it didn’t really feel like a threat
not in March. Those who had already got it before recovered well barring a few
exceptions, so I hadn’t given much thought to it. When the cases were rising
alarmingly in April I was in Indore, the rumors of the next lockdown were high
back then and that’s when I decided it is time to come back home. At this time,
we were searching for a mentor for our venture as we were pretty confused on
what way to take ahead from here onwards.
The timeline from mid-April till May end was like a
nightmare. Intially it was about arranging medicines like remdesivir and actemra to friends and college alums. First my young nephews got ill, then my sister, then mother and I,
all 3 of us were found covid positive. I lost many close friends and relatives
during this time. I almost lost the hope to come out of it alive, for an entire
week I was bedridden and couldn’t summon the courage to even grab the water
bottle near me. I had already given my bank account, insurance and debit card details to my family. It took me a long time to recover physically and mentally from
the entire covid saga. I have already covered the entire troubled time in my
Hindi blog ‘kaahi ankaahi’, you can refer it if you want to know more.
Entered June and I was pretty much mentally and physically
exhausted, I felt like this is a new life and I have to take baby steps again.
Many people advised me against exercising as there were many cases of a heart
attack during workout sessions with high heart rates. I was finding it hard to
climb stairs or walk 10k steps. There was a great brain fog also, it was tough
to read excel sheets, create PPTs, conceptualize new ideas, and execute them. We
started with a virtual career Bootcamp at that time to engage some school
audience, we got a good number of registrations but not many attendees.
By July, I was pretty much in good physical condition but
the existential crisis was more and more on many days. I was pretty clear on
many aspects of life on what I have to do or need to do but not on whether the
end results will excite me or not. That’s when I started finding refuse in
video games and books, reality was a little hard to accept. That was also the
time when my co-founder and I had a 6 hours conversation during a 30k steps a
day challenge, where he told me that I need to take more risks, be more
vulnerable, try new things and most
importantly stop associating happiness with success and look for happiness
beyond success. The discussion was one of the founding bases for the decisions I
took in the latter part of the year that changed a major part of my life.
By August, we were trying to look for potential tie-ups of
Diffr with coaching classes. We roamed around the streets of Indore, Ujjain, and
Bhopal and met several coaching class founders. I also realized the impact of
covid while roaming in commercial complexes. It is one thing reading about how
the economy is impacted, but when you talk to people whose whole business was
based on students, who were sent by home by their colleges, when you see
30%-40% coaching classes closed in buildings with a ‘to-let’ sign, when you
hear a coaching owner saying that they have hardly earned anything from last 12
months, online coaching is just not working for them and they may need to
evaluate other means of livelihood, you realize the impact this pandemic has
had on many people and how lucky many of us were who had decent savings or
regular monthly income. My dad also got hospitalized for a week which troubled
us for a long time, it is one thing to suffer yourself and completely other to
see your loved ones suffering, the kind of helplessness I felt during that time
can’t be described in words, glad he recovered quickly.
The next 4 months passed very quickly, I have very little
memory of what I was doing, a lot of stuff happened in both my personal and
professional life. We organized a pan India case study competition for b school
and got a good response, we tied up with some institutes to help us march ahead
in our journey, we got recognized as a start-up by start-up India initiative,
we finalized a vendor to prepare Diffr’s product (website and app), we hired some interns to help
us build the product and services better. At the same time, I got dengue also,
covid then dengue in the same year felt funny, 2nd time I uploaded
‘Ashwathama hai mein, nahi marega’ pic on my stories. Dengue made me suffer so
much, I had to take injections for headaches and wear knee caps for weeks, but
as always, I recovered albeit I knew I have to say goodbye to a huge chunk of
my hairline now due to back to back life-threatening illness. I sent my parents
to my sister’s and I stayed alone for almost a month doing everything by myself
from cooking to cleaning. I also went to Kolkata on a train journey to attend a
wedding and give some change to myself.
Here I am writing this, trying to think whether it was a
good year or a bad year, I don’t know but surely it was one of the defining years
of my life. This was also the year I witnessed many miracles and it is high
time I acknowledge them. The first of many was despite losing some really close
friends and relatives, all my family members were able to come out of covid and
many other illnesses healthy. Also, despite my personal struggles, I was able to
persist another year in my journey of changing the mindset of society towards
life and career and was able to touch the lives of some students and parents if not
many, I realized the work I am doing has the potential to change the life of so many students and save them from having a successful yet unhappy life. I amassed followership of 11,200 on LinkedIn and I receive many
messages every week from people on how my writing is able to inspire them,
motivate them, help them and also give a realistic picture in a world of show
off and pretention.
Last, but not least, something very clichéd happened
to me, something that I would say I was waiting for a long time but lost hope
somewhere between the later years of my life. Guess the rumors of finding it
when you are not looking for it, or it happens when it has to happen or someday
you will realize why it never worked out before was worth it. Being the Ted
Mosby I am and giving up the hope of finding ‘the one’ in the rat race of life,
at times you realize that things need not be overdramatic or larger than life
always, you need not hear the violin in the first meeting, maybe you won’t
hear the violin, time slowing down, a slow breeze blowing leaves, colorful flowers on road after 21 years and one day you will realize that there was always a melody in the background, when you pause and
reflect in silence, you are able to hear and appreciate that melody and maybe
the ‘larger than life’ drama starts after first recognizing that melody that
was always there.
For the first 29 years of my life, I have always in some way
associated my happiness with my success and I pushed myself to set the bar
higher for that success. As I achieved more, my bar was set higher and higher, I craved more and I felt more and more empty and alone. Like a cliché,
I realized success is not the answer for happiness, and maybe it is good to not
celebrate always or be vulnerable and completely helpless and be dependent on
someone.
2021, you were a life-defining year if not career-defining,
I am thankful to many people who stood by me and supported me as I recovered
from bad health and other crisis and I am thankful to God for showing me a path
of happiness and satisfaction, thankful to the universe for guiding me in the right
direction and thankful to one special reader who was following my blog silently
for 11 years who changed my outlook towards life, guess a writer may not get as
much popularity as a singer or dancer, but when it mattered the most, writing
paid off.
Signing off, 2022 you are my ‘poos ki raat’ and I am ready
with my ‘alaav’.
