I'm thirty-two, please enjoy!

Secret revealed: I am no longer in my twenties. Till today I’m 31 and after 7 pm today, I’ll be 32.

31 years. That is a long time to live in this crazy planet, or let me say, a planet colonized by crazy people. 

For past few years, I've been penning down a memoir piece every birthday. That has been a kind of ritual. This time, though, I have been less enthusiastic. So this poorly written piece is all that you'll read.

3 years back, it was Twenty-eight years of solitude. Apparently, I was then grasping the importance of peeking into the solitude inside oneself that lurks below the surface. Ever since, I've come only closer to the essence of being myself. In the process, I've been rediscovering myself as sometimes petty, sometimes irrational and sometimes outright despicable creature. That, though, never makes me hate myself. Isn't that quite wonderful?

Two years back, it was Twenty-nine years of insignificance. By this time, my covert ambitions had outpaced my performance and the ever present sense of self-doubt had grown only more intense. In that piece, I'd reflected on my years in +2 college and in the medical school. This is how I look back at my victory over the agony that lasted for years during my late teenage and early youth years:

Things were, fortunately, about to change as I had come some years away from my teenage and I had seen a much larger world beyond Nepal: Nepalis were not the only suffering people in the world. Though in a rather lackluster way, I began to realize that my being tormented and miserable little helped the world, and if at all, I might have been burdening the world with one more gloomy creature. On insignificance, there were so many insignificant people around me that, it was not that shameful or deplorable a thing as I used to assume earlier. Even if it were, worrying about insignificance was no way of getting around it: one had to act in whatever way possible.

Then last year, it was a 2 part series in which I had seen life--my own and that of others--in some more depth. Part one was 'Encounter with a speeding car: Some reflections on life and death'. With some sarcasm and dark humor, I'd elaborated as to what would have happened if indeed the speeding car had hit me:

My friends would be obviously devastated but even the enemies would not be happy either (they must be wishing for me something worse than death, let's say, a long life of suffering and humiliation.) For some, nostalgia of moments with me would grip for long enough, for others, the plans involving me would make them realize the loss. Still others would pity the way I suffered and died. Those who played mischief with me would possibly regret having done that. Those who had scores to settle with me would scratch their heads and mumble: well, that bastard deserved that fate, but now that he is gone, whom will I settle my score with?

The second part (Tale of a devastated father) was much more poignant in which I delve on the inauspicious end of the life of a patient whose family was fleeced unethically to penury by a hospital. I later wrote a 5,000-word essay in Nepali keeping that particular case in a larger perspective.

Today, I'm in the middle of a book titled 'On the Brink' by Henry M. Paulson, former US treasury secretory which is a painful chronicle of global financial crisis that set in the US in 2008. I am just content to be reading this. Ironically, it makes sense to read how serious people fight a grave crisis at a time when our own country is at the edge of a precipice and leadership is just happy to be enjoying the perks.

Given my writing spree over past year, I doubt readers are now looking forward to some lengthy piece. And moreover, I am in no mood to be profligate with words this time. So, let's be frugal and stop here. Happy birthday to me.

(For visual pleasure of the readers, here I am uploading some of the beautiful photos that my mobile camera has taken over last couple of months.)