When your life changes

Do you change with it?

The answer for many is an obvious yes. But I beg to differ. It isn’t always so. When I got married and my life changed overnight, I wasn’t ready to change myself and accommodate everything new that life had brought to my doorsteps. I wasn’t ready for the new country, new city, new food habits, new lifestyle habits, new people, new prejudices, new fears and even new love. So everything around me moved in a whir and I stubbornly remained mournful and aloof. Refusing to change with the world around me..

I don’t know how and when but I realised the futility of what I was doing and how unhappy it made me. I changed myself internally and began to love what life had presented me with. Of course I didn’t have the time to get too comfortable with US, the Fremont county library, Lake Elizabeth or the wondrous San Francisco, life changed yet again and we came back to India. Rampaging endlessly between Pune and Bombay, I landed at Hyderabad. Some more changes and another job and then again changes!

There seems to be no such thing as constant in my life. But I am determined now to even learn to enjoy the butterflies in my stomach and the fear I fight when I encounter change. But this time I am enjoying the thrill of new found love, of a work I have been eager and restless to do for eons.

Am changing jobs, from Information and Communication technologies for Development to only communications- my area of strength and passion. Only now I get to finally work with an NGO which believes in advocacy as much as I believe in my words. Something I have wanted to always do but never got the chance too.

Come Saturday, I start work at the Foundation for Democratic Reforms – popularly known as the Lok Satta Movement (no, not the newspaper folks), founded by Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan. weblink for Lok Satta is here.

Am restless, am excited, am nervous all at once. Something tells me this is a chance for me to learn. That I am somehow treading closer to what is ultimately going to change something inside me forever. If NISG was an eye-opener to government and its potentials, possibilities, as well as the inherent dormancies, bureaucracies and powerplays, Lok Satta I am hoping will finally help me to work with the focus being in governance reforms. It is I believe like poking a lazy elephant with a needle, initially it may not even feel the needle, but when you stab it again and again at the same point with a needle it may finally feel something sore and then the pinch.

Lok Satta fascinates me because for once rather than telling people I am here what can I do for you, it will give me the chance to tell people, you know what to do, let me help you realise your own potential. It is teaching a man how to fish and not feeding him for life.