Intishar:

Intishar: Urdu for Disruption

I was asked by an individual whom I had just met and had a conversation with at the fire, if I ain’t lucky to be able to travel so freely.

He was talking about how being in the armed forces he has had the chance to be pretty well traveled and shared his travel stories about far lands. When it was my turn, I spoke about how the last few months have been my best travel space in a lifetime.

The story of getting out of a 9to9 job and taking time off to wing out without a roadmap sounds like a distant dream to him, and he feels I’m not excited enough about it. He says ‘if you were excited and happy about what you are doing, you would be showing a different kind of energy. I am failing to see that in you. Do you know how lucky you are to be able to do this! People only dream about it!’ I tried to break it down for him and for me.

Yes, the fancy whim of ditching the desk and reaching out to a calling was turned into a reality for me. It has been a dream, for as long as I was stuck to the corner of a cabin and wanting to flee from situations and responsibilities and chores I was not passionate about. I am now on a travel spree, taking one day at a time, stopping at places and exploring people as I have never done before. This is exhilarating. Enough to jump out of bed every day with the same enthusiasm like day 1. I am traveling freely. I don’t really know where I’d like to spend the next day, which corners of a place I’d want to explore and all of it without a checklist(this took a while). I am traveling burden free. But there is this other unperceived thing to it.

The reason why he found a certain kind of energy missing in my words is the worry that comes with starting off new and with close to zero financial back up. The calling that I chose to pursue needs to at one point of time build to a profession and help me win my bread and butter, and that point of time needs to happen really soon because of a fast fading backup. However, with new beginnings perseverance and persistence are keys. You have to take cautious steps, grow a folio, network across, find solid ground underneath your feet, be patient, something that I am not well equipped with. It hit me hard a few nights back when I visited an ATM after quite a while and forced myself to chalk out my finances after looking at the remaining balance.

Setting budgets for each day and splitting the allocation between travel and food is what I’m religiously doing every morning. My food intake has gone down drastically, with only one full meal a day and the rest of it in fruits and healthy small bites. The number of cups of chai has plummeted. Tobacco, substance, packaged foods, luxury consumptions, all are curbed to the d. If I break down my life into pre-earning, earning and post-earning phases, I’ve never had to think about a meal in the first two. I do now in the third.

This brings me to ponder if the winging out decision was not well thought of, and I agree to it because it wasn’t. I hadn’t planned for it. And this record has of late started playing in my mind every now and then. It crops up in conversations and shows in my countenance, and when someone asks if I ain’t lucky to be living a lot of people’s dream, I say, I am proud, but there is this other thing to it.