from there to here....

I remember, in school and college, I was often identified as the girl with a perpetual smile on her face. I was genuinely a very cheerful, optimistic person and it showed on my face too.

In University, I was dubbed the 'Cheshire Cat' by my husband-to-be (though neither of us knew it then) for the ever-present smile of course. Also the fact that I was almost never to be harried by anything.

In hostel, during those semester exams, bowing to peer pressure, I too would burn the nightlight way into the wee hours of morning. But only the light burnt. The eyelids would be shut tight, and dreaming about an easy paper, only rarely succumbing to the nightmare of a question paper that was totally Greek and Latin to me.

Not for me the pressure to be top of the pack. I would be quite happy to be somewhere among the top 5 or 10.
Not for me the last minute frenzy of rushing around for most likely questions and last minute mugging. Tho' I WOULD have my mental antennae up for any little word or two that I could catch, which could easily be elongated into 2 or 3 pages in the answer sheet. (That's the charm of marketing- puh-lenty you can digress on...)

I was bent on advertising as a career, and started off quite promisingly on that road.. I was enjoying my work, my colleagues, my boss...No huge targets..
and then the road curved.

Unwittingly I was dragged into the hairpin curves of a job in sales. And while the highs were HIGH, the lows could be TROUGHS!

Looking back, I think it the height of irony that the girl who had nary a care in the world, should now live her life ruled by numbers and the pressure to reach a certain number by the end of the month, by hook or by crook!

The smile still is on my lips most of the time, but in my mind runs the thought- you dratted fellow/felly, why can't you SIGN the damned deal?!!!
And certain days, when the pressure mounts sky high, can you believe it- I start having nightmares about my bete noire in school and college- Math! I dream - never that I'm flunking- but that I haven't studied one bit and my exams are tomorrow. And I toss and turn thinking about a way out.

Whew!

I remember, while I was about to join up for my graduation, an astrologer family friend advised my mother to enrol me up for Maths, cos he could see that I would 'shine' in Math. We were very polite to him, but once he left, all of us fell over laughing at the joke! Me and Maths! and shining!

"hahahahahohohohehehehe" That's Uncle having the last laugh. For shining or not, numbers sure have ruled my life for some time now.
I admit Uncle just MAY have had something in what he prophesied. Though I still have my doubts about why I'm doing what I'm doing, and whether I'm going to go anywhere with it.

And in addition to this, I have to juggle the balls of motherhood and wifehood and housekeeper-hood.
Little wonder that I think I'm going crazed!

This post is provoked by the fact that I have 3 bloody deals that have been pending for SO long and have been tantalisingly going from small to medium to big, falling just that little bit short of getting signed at each discussion. Just one of them will almost meet my targets for the month, BUT!

Man!I wish I could turn back the clock......
In the meantime, pliss to keep your fingers crossed for me and for those deals to get signed. Immediately!