AT 20

Numerically it’s just one more than nineteen but it also means that “I am out of the teen club”. So, what’s special, nothing’s changed. Everything is same as it was, the day before when I was nineteen. I still prattle a lot to which my pompous friends show sullen looks but most of the time I am able to gather a lot of attention. I still change my beard style every month or so from goatee to balbo to nothing at all. I still follow the popular routine of waking through the night watching inexorably long English episodes and having my forty winks that I had eluded next day in the classroom. I still move out with my friends to malls, restaurants and while returning we sing popular Hindi songs in unison which in the future would be reminiscent of my adolescence. The only change I see, though very rare is that now I write twenty as my age in application forms and that my parents behave a bit differently now.

But they say it holds something more important, as if something is hidden within it and they say it is a sign of getting close to the real world, of reducing time, of closing opportunities.

But hey! Is it not right that life is rife with opportunities and you can get it whenever you feel like you are in search for it and if not available you can create it for yourself? So why be alarmed?

After having thought in such a rational way I assured myself that I had pontificated correctly and was contended until a senior got very particular and asked me as to what would I do to create an opportunity for myself? I had no answer. How could I have one at this point of time? It was like one of those questions that my father used to vex me with before I came to this opportune place.

Although it was not expected of me I tried to give it another thought this time with more rational attitude only to find myself heading towards a wall so high that if I didn’t prepare myself to jump over it I would be stopped by it forever, My next thoughts were that I was standing before this wall watching it, waiting for it to collapse while other guys went past it quickly and I wished if I could trace some steps back in the past to get prepared. But to what past? How far back? And then inadvertently I say 20 would be the right time for me.