My Life at N.E.D. - The Prologue

Today I am 47 years old.

Today I am embarking on a journey. I am going to do something I never thought I will ever do.

I am going to embrace my past. In particular, I am going to tell the story of a certain period of my life, the four and half years that totally changed the way I looked at myself and the world around me. Those years that totally stripped away my sense of purpose and self-worth.

As I am typing these words on my iPhone, my mind is blank. I don’t know what follows next in this piece.

But, I think, I do have a vague idea where this needs to go. I’ll let my fingers glide across the virtual keyboard, and will patiently observe how this journey unfolds.

This is the story of my time at N.E.D. University of Engineering & Technology - the most dreadful period of my life that started 30 years ago.

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I anticipate that I will end up writing quite a few posts in this series. May be 10, or 50, I don’t know yet. I am not sure exactly what events of my life will I cover in this series of posts.

I am not sure if it’ll be an interesting read, and if Hollywood will ever make a movie based on the events of my life.

Probably not, and probably never :-)

You might ask: why now? If this stuff was not important enough to talk about in the last 30 years, then why think and write about it now?

I want to write about these events because I think this “material” is going to help my kids. It’ll hopefully equip them with insights to handle challenges, especially bullying, in their academic, personal, and professional lives. It may also give them an insight into who I am. Strangely enough, they seem to be interested in events of my childhood. I am not yet sure why. But I can see that the curiosity is there. I can’t help but feel a responsibility to share snippets from my journey.

And perhaps, reflecting on the past will be therapeutic for my mental health as well.

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Perhaps I’ll share a few tales of people around me as well. At the moment, I’m uncertain which stories to share and which ones to consign to the deepest corners of my memory, never to be revisited.

But most importantly, this is the beginning of two new stories. Stories of my son, and my daughter. Growing up in a “new” country where they are different from almost everybody around them, disconnected from the culture, language, and way of life of their ancestors. They are different from everyone around them in so many ways… I’d be heartbroken if they have to learn these hard lessons of life the way I did.

May be this will help them write their own stories.