When I was a kid, I wanted to be a doctor, a medical one and not like my distant uncle who could treat all kinds of illness and ailments with a handful of ashes and a big broom. When I used to go to the hills during holidays, I used to visit my uncle's house every day just because I thought it was fun to watch people getting whacked with a broom. I don't know if the patients got better or they had to be bedridden for a week with all that broom-bashing from my uncle.
But after my fifth grade, my dream to be a doctor waned and I wanted to be the first Nepali guy to play in the NBA. In another five years, I only grew by a mere seven inches instead of a foot and a half that I had hoped for. I did not drink Complan or Boost then. I should have. Also, in the early teen years, I drank local chyaang at Maila Dai's shop every Saturday. Now I think that might have hampered my height growth drastically.
Then came the movie about Jim Morrison and 'The Doors'. I wanted to be a songwriter now. I started writing songs and asked my friends who knew how to play the guitar and drums to sing it for me. They practiced it all night and did their impromptu show, the unplugged version at school the next day. One day my English teacher heard the
back benchers singing my song and complained to the principal.
I was invited for an early morning chat at the principal's office the next day. The old man just sat silently in his chair and asked me to sing the song. I apologized for writing the song. He didn't accept my apology. He threatened to kick me out of school if I did not sing for him that day. So, with the voice of a donkey, I sang the song in one breath. He listened very attentively and then finally remarked that I had the talent for at least writing something but a thirteen year old should not be using such inappropriate language in his writing, and rhyming everything with various parts of human anatomy.
After SLC, I took computer courses and then became a computer instructor at the same institute that I had attended. My students were government officials, SLC wallahs and even foreigners. It was not that hard to teach Word Perfect, Lotus and dBase. I don't know what happened to those programs now that everybody uses Word, Excel and Access instead.
I even edited a computer magazine then but of course, the articles did not need much editing as most of the computer geeks who contributed had mostly copy pasted the whole thing from some other computer magazine and books. No matter how hard you tried to remind them that plagiarism was not a good thing, these engineers and programmers did not care and the guy publishing the magazine just wanted his name in the magazine and so copy and paste was fine with him.
I studied computers in university, mixed it with business and what not but now, I have to ask my niece to fix my iPad whenever there is a problem. And her mother gently reminds me that our parents wasted thousands of dollars sending me to school and I did not turn out to be a Nepali Bill Gates.
After working here and there for years, I finally wanted to be a film director one day when I heard about Robert Rodriquez a decade later after his first film. I then began writing film scripts and shared it with my friends. Then recently, I showed it to a guy who actually has a Masters' Degree in screenwriting from the West. Like my school principal many decades ago, he too complimented me for having the skills to write crap. But he gave me the greatest advice I have ever received: You don't have the hunger and until the day you are hungry and you really want to do it, don't even bother starting anything let alone writing the greatest screenplay in the world.
Now, I'm working on my 16th film script but it's the first one where there is an actual conflict and then a resolution unlike my previous great works of art where the hero never really did anything but bitch about life and then either got hit by a bus or fell down a cliff or got dumped by a lady who actually passed away twenty years ago but is back to take revenge on guys who roam around after midnight. Every morning, I sit down for an hour and write a few pages of my 'first' script. I hope to finish it next month and then finally ask another friend of mine who has a Master's Degree in direction if he is interested to help me make a movie.
It's now been three years that I have stuck to only one thing. The years before that I used to get involved in three different ventures at a time and all of them flopped due to my lack of patience and my great ability to delegate everything to everyone else. I have been a running a small business for the past three years and I enjoy it. I wake up in the morning to open the gates for my employees and work hard the whole day along with my staff.
Then in the evening and sometimes after midnight, I'm running around checking all switches and appliances and running the water machine to fill up the tanks besides making to-do lists for the next day. I have the hunger to do well, both for me and my staff. This one small business is finally sustainable and is making a profit even though it is not enough to make me the next Nepali billionaire after Binod Chaudhary. But I'm loving it!
Finally, as I enter the second half of my life, I'm learning to be patient and to work hard. I want to make sure that I have a five-year plan and then I will follow up on it instead of day dreaming about all the brilliant things I want to do. The last time I went to university was more than a decade ago. I have enrolled in a Master's degree now. I will be opening a new outlet next year as I expand my business. And yes, I'm making that movie by 2020. And for my wife, I'm buying her a Platinum ring on her birthday so that she will stop making fun of my 'one inch' height advantage over her which gets knocked down back to earth when she wears her three-inch heels.
kalumaila99@gmail.com
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