When your hatke is not very hatke…
I’ve been meaning to do something different since the start of the year. I had been bored with my usual work which, though was getting challenging day by day, wasn’t getting interesting enough. So when lockdown started it seemed like an added opportunity. I hadn’t figured out what to do yet. But as the trend of dalgonas, home baked bread and mandala art started on social media I contemplated why not do something artsy. I looked at my options…a sketch a day, origami animals, may be something for home decor…?? But away from my ignorant self, hid those books waiting for me to come to my senses. See, in my attempt to do something hatke, in the beginning of the year I had already signed up for an IIBF certificate course of foreign exchange. Now I don’t work in forex department, rather I work in retail area of banking. And a course of MSME or retail loans would actually benefit me rather than forex, which may or may not be useful in the future. But I chose forex because….in Definite’s words, “Aise hi…sexy lag raha tha.”
I wanted to do something that I wanted to do, not what I needed to do. Forex seemed interesting enough back in March. The fact that I hadn’t gotten around to it was another thing. But now the FEDAI books were sitting on the mantle, waiting for me.
Ugh! I had actually paid for them…so I wasn’t going to let them go to waste. So when the world around me dived into dancing, cooking and painting, I plunged into the technical world of foreign trade policy and documentary credits. So much for being artsy, right? Anyway once I got into it, it was all about procedures, regulations, RBI guidelines and Govt. approvals. Turns out forex wasn’t that sexy in fact. The appealing words like ‘demurrage’ lost its charm when I came to know it means nothing more than ‘charges paid for delay in unloading a ship’. My resolve started to crumble and I read the books merely out of the compulsion I felt to sticking up to the project I had started.
Where Insta flooded with creative pics of paintings and home made delicacies and FB innovated new challenges every day, there were no takers for pics depicting my lethargic progress through this tedious endeavor I had put myself into. Nobody cared what ‘anchor currency’ meant and how it worked. A shot of highlighted paras of HBP with notes scribbled in the margins was what it was. Unnecessary and dull! You can’t make it endearing to anyone no matter how much you put the books in sun to get that sunkissed look.
Forex wasn’t only tedious but also the most extensive course of all the courses on offer.
On the one hand I was tied up with forex on the other, I had taken up the task of reading the gigantic ‘India after Gandhi’ by Ramachandra Guha, something I had DNFed two years ago. I thought what better time to complete it than the lockdown. Turns out I wanted my brain cells to bleed to death. I was either reading the books or scrolling mobile aimlessly with them hovering over the back of my mind. Fatigue and boredom were on board but compulsion was driving the bus.
I came to realize that overloading yourself is no fun and academics has no place of appeal in the age of social media. In the end I wanted to do something for myself. Something that I liked and that which bettered me. I kinda achieved that goal. I mean I know more about forex and India’s history than I knew a year ago. Has it made me smarter? A tad bit of course. And I’ll take that. But with it came the realization that I have a bad habit of overcommitting myself. And in the process of overcommitting, I overestimate my abilities, eventually being overwhelmed by the work that lies ahead. This time it clearly drove my brain into overrride. But I am overjoyed now that it’s over. Aced the forex test! Phew…what was I overthinking about?
