Recognise The Choice

Sometimes - maybe most of the time we are unaware of the fact that we have a choice to make. By we I am referring to myself (a twenty year old with a teenage hangover) and to teenagers as well.

Somethings are so bred in society that the choice can no longer be discerned from the mess. We are just gradually and slowly nudged in one direction and are never aware that there was another direction which we could have taken. In short the choice - even to make a choice - is taken away from us. A child is born and the next 60 years of his/her life are already planned. We grow up and we don't even realise that the dreams we are chasing are not even our own. It is perfectly normal to give up your dreams for the greater good or whatever but to not have a choice and to not know that you could have chosen otherwise is criminal.

The problem occurs when right in the middle of your life you realise you don't like what you are doing, when you somehow figure out the grand hoax that you called 'your dream'. Suddenly you have to make choices and then it crashes down on you with stupendous force that your life has flown by and you weren't even given a chance to try and steer its course.

There is this fixed path to happiness and success and despite loads of evidence to the contrary, we are unwilling to afford ourselves the luxury to choose or at least recognise that there is supposed to be a choice here!

And its not only about success. Its about learning to make a choice. however, we are exposed to the world of choices too late. We are thrown in at the deep end and we don't even know what water is - much less how to swim and save ourselves.

At the end all of this fades when compared to the longing:
"I wish I knew that I had a choice!"

You yearn to make a wrong choice and learn from it but ALAS! When you finally realise that you have a choice - you don't really have one.

Explaining the title - "bieng twenty-een"

So I guess its best if I explain this particular 'weird' phenomena as well before people write me off as a nut job. First off lets get the pronunciation out of the way. Its easy really. You say eighteen, nineteen and instead of saying twenty, you say twenteen. And that basically is the whole concept behind it - the teenage. Does becoming twenty at once catapult you from an angry kid to a mature adult? The more important question here I guess is - should it? I mean after all you spent 19 years of your life being irresponsible and now suddenly you have to be responsible.

I guess the problem is that your excuse has been taken away. Now you can be taunted with the torturous phrase - you are not a kid anymore or you are no longer a teenager or the really sad one; Grow up and start taking responsibility. But the feelings and the ideas you had formed about life are not that easy to let go off. Its the age when you begin to realize whether you are on the right path or whether you have made the biggest mistake of your life. Take me for example, I am trying to become an engineer and I realize now that its not really going to work one way or the other. I think I should have become an architect - maybe I would have failed that too - maybe university just isn't the place where I was supposed to be. Anyways coming back to the point - which I have quite lost track off - what does being twenty entail.

Suddenly, expectations start weighing you down and you realize that the carefree days are gone. Problem is you don't want to let go. So I guess this is all about not wanting to or not being able to let go of your teenage and this blog will document my thoughts as I traverse through the twentieth year of my life and as you will or would have recognized by now; my thoughts are not much different from those of a nineteen year old. After all if you look logically at it - the difference is only of a few seconds. This side of midnight you are a crazy nineteen year old so how can the passing of a few seconds just whisk away all that and leave you a very level headed twenty year old. This is what I like to call - "being twenteen" - you are welcome to call it crazy - seriously I don't mind!

The "bad guy"

So lets start this blogging experience with my latest weird theory and trust me I can churn those out by the minute. Today, I am going to defend the bad guy. You know not the really really bad man e.g. Musharraf or Bush but the so so bad guy. I mean its because of the bad guy that you can discern the good guy. I know its the oldest and most boring and most obvious theory. Like black needs white and dark needs light and.. Anyways my point is a little different - maybe entirely different. What I am trying to say is that the bad guy makes a loser look like a winner. Take for example a person who has a dark and dirty secret. Now the bad guy comes along and announces it world wide. We call him bad because its not the right thing or the nice thing to do, blah blah blah...

What happens though is that now the dirty secret guy gets to be the guy who should be pitied because the bad guy let out his secret. However, if the bad guy hadn't done it so blatantly and the secret was just released without a real source then the dirty secret guy doesn't get the pity. You see how my theory is different. I am not talking about the really really bad guy who would be brilliant enough to leak the secret and not announce it. I am talking about the misfit bad guy who just says things without caring. This bad guy saves so many dirty secret guys - its amazing.

P.S. I know this is kind of weird for my first blog but I assure you I have some sane stuff to write about too and I have heard people say I write good humor =D