It hurts to part..

 The feeling of emptiness when an enriching, warm, long-running engagement ends is so depressing. I finished Pachinko today - my first book of this year, and I am already missing it so bad. It was a long book and I have spent many wonderful hours with it. Some experiences have this quality of haunting you long after they get over. I am thinking of some other times when it hurt to part. 

1. Books: Atlas Shrugged, Totto chan, A suitable boy. 

2. TV series: Big Bang theory, Friends

3. Places:  Most places where I have spent a considerable time - my two homes in Allahabad, my apartment in Joka, my home for 4 years in Bangalore, my apartment in Hyderabad. Strangely, the 8 days spent in Udaipur + neighbouring places continue to haunt me. 

4. Workplaces: I only felt this for my last software company, Yodlee(now Envestnet) and my last company, Medtronic. Of course, I spent my longest time working in these two. And my school which I had attended for 14 years. Didn't feel much for either colleges. 

These are just off the top of my head, and heavily tainted with recency bias. Starting a new book tonight to ease the misery. So long!

Growing old together..

..in a marriage is undeniably overrated. I think it is far more important to grow happy together. It needs to be acknowledged that the lack of happiness is unhappiness. When we stop being happy together, growing old together just translates into two miserable people waiting for their respective lives to end.

An agreement without definite timelines is as good as void. Till death do us apart is not a timeline. May be, in the earlier times, when human lifetimes were less than 50 years, and days were only as long as the daylight. Not any more. 

A commitment made at 22 should not be binding at 42. Humans grow and evolve continuously. It is an insult to human intellect to presume that 2 people think and feel the same way over a lifetime of 75 years. 

It is said that all the cells in the human body are renewed over a period of 7 years. This means that effectively, we do not share a single cell with our own self from 7 years ago. It think 7 years is a good time to review and renew the contract of marriage. Or annul!