My fascination with night bus might be hard to understand for those who have never had to eagerly wait out the year for the dreaded Kathmandu winter when you finally got to visit your ancestral home during the two-month vacation. There were no day buses to Jhapa in those days. Flying was an option. But even when my whole family chose to fly to Bhadrapur, I would always take the night bus.[break]
After my father’s transfer to Jhapa, we lived in Birtamod on the East-West Highway for a year. Throughout that year, every single day, I would be up by six or seven and plant myself firmly in front of the window overlooking the highway: Now, which bus would make it to Birtamod first today? In those days, the buses came with all sorts of exotic names and colors: Ugrachandi Travels (red and green stripes), Ajima Luxury Coach (red and black stripes), Welcome Travels (leaf green stripes). To watch them whiz past in the hazy mornings used to be my favorite pastime.
When I look back at those days, I still get excited at the memory of my multicolored dream carriers, even though growing up has meant I’ve had to give up that ‘childish’ dream, among many others.
Illustration: Sworup Nhasiju
These days, at the end of each year, my head starts swarming with questions, the questions I have no answers to: Why didn’t I do this? Why the hell did I do that? Yes, I’ve had to give up on many of my dreams, but surely, I can still achieve quite a bit if I put my mind to it. Why did I fail to work towards my dreams this past year?
Perhaps I’m not the only person who regrets putting off an important task, just for a day. Someone who habitually does so can only silently nod in agreement at the famous Fred Brooks quip: ‘How does a project get to be a year late?’ “One day at a time.”
You don’t get it. Why on earth did you not apply for that important fellowship, or start on your vital exercise regimen? Why didn’t you start this? Why didn’t you complete that? It seems incredible how you kept missing great opportunities one after another, without even realizing it.
But no matter how fruitless you think your past 12 months have been, it’s impossible for you not to have learnt something during the time. For instance, I’ve failed to keep most of my resolutions for 2012, by a long shot. But I still learnt a lot. For instance, I learnt how not to live alone; how not to take care of dogs; how not to handle difficult relationships.
But I seem to be running out of time to learn new stuff. Growing old, I find, isn’t much of a concern until you actually start feeling old, which, unfortunately, I can’t help these days. I constantly think about what I can realistically hope to achieve in what little time I have on this planet.
Perhaps this preoccupation with aging is the reason I feel like 2012 has outsprinted me. It’s said that as people age, their accuracy at guessing the passage of time declines. I can vouch for it.
As I approach the closure of yet another year –and a thankful end of a long run of missed targets – a sense of dread is starting to take hold again. What if I fail to keep my resolutions for 2013 as well?
If I so dread resolutions, you might ask, why do I make them in the first place? For the simple reason that people who make resolutions at the start of the year are ten times more likely to meet their goals than the folks without explicit resolutions.
This is another notorious habit I’ve developed of late: I tend to think in ‘practical’ terms, a lot more than I used to in my night bus-watching days. In keeping with this spirit of practicality and since I’ve failed miserably to keep my successive New Year resolutions, I’ve decided to change track this time.
Thus my resolution for 2013 is to try to learn from my mistakes—past, present and future. But I fear even this simple-sounding resolution will be hard to keep. First, I need to be able to decide which events in my life constitute ‘mistakes’?
The big dream of a wild-eyed boy to take people home to their loved ones safely by navigating the treacherous Nepali highways: no, that surely wasn’t a mistake. For if it was, I would have to give up dreaming altogether. Despite my dismal record at keeping resolutions, that’s one thing I certainly am not prepared to give up yet.
The writer is the op-ed editor at Republica.