Blinking my Past

Its been long since I read a book. So was trying at my company's shelves and came across the book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I finished reading this book in two sittings.

I don't want give long review about this book, and for that matter even the review in jiffy won't do good. It's not that the book is bad, rather I don't want my reader to get distorted image from this wanna be voracious reader!!! Better, you can get more info about the book here, here and here.

So just let me give the what this book is all about: The book is about the decisions taken in split seconds, our insights over the issues by our instincts, in many of the cases can yield better results than the one's which are taken with deeper scientific understanding, with lot of experience and expertise and great deal of research. The book speaks on more on these lines with interesting real time examples.

In short you get the funda from its tag line: "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking".

Many of us, have taken split second decisions that might have changed us in someway or other. Some decisions or insights might have saved us from serious problem, some might have given happy endings. I would like to share one incident I encountered few years back.

I am kinda guy who shy away girls since my childhood. This was there till I was in my college final year. The usual teenage syndrome which affect all teenagers, except few abnormal mammals, affected me too. It wasn't love at first sight or not even love at all. But it some kind of craze or crush or say something on one girl. She wasn't Ash of our college nor I am Salman of our coll. But I was attracted to her. Never spoke to her. Never asked intro from my friends. Never tried to do anything to tell her. I just kept watching (staring), in other words, sightifying her. This continued for a year. All the usual filmy acts followed but never allowed anything to put myself under bad impression before her.

Basically I was very innocent guy who thought all girls are good, good and nothing but good ideally. I pocessed some of the adolescent straits, like "I know everything", "I can solve all problems", "I am the best" attitude. Bit egotist!! So every incident I encountered with her, I was appreciating myself for my own actions. I thought my actions produced all the incidents. In short, I found myself as the reason for all causes. This looks very funny when I think it over now. But thats how the life was then. No wonder, I learnt the realities of life in very hard way. Thats another big story.

Coming to the point, the following went some time. Few of my friends came to know about this and started to tease and all. I was enjoying all these and life seemed easy. I thought everything going good, until some day I started to realise that something going wrong. Something wrong with myself. I was idealist teenager at that time. I want everything to have purpose and seeking meaningful result for all actions of mine. This started to take beating during this period. I started to realise that things are going without any clear point. The theories I made by myself, which I found later has no hard footing on ground realities, started to give me troubles.

I was in utter confusion. Chaos with all the complexities I bought myself around me. This might not be understandable in words. Just take it, I was in total mess.

This total mess bought cyclic mood swings and in between deep insights how I took things wrong. Thats when I started to mature and got the hang of realties of life. In between these cyclic swings, I had many profound insights. At one time, I felt very strongly to drop everything about the girl I was fond of until then. The Blink happened here.

I don't know what made me to take that decision, but I took it very blindly without any thinking. I made my friends to know about this turn.

Sooner, the girl got committed with some other guy. I felt no hard feeling at all. I felt all was well and went well. Days went, I totally forgot things. After two years, she ditched the guy she was in "supposedly in love" and got into relationship with another guy. How easy it looked??? uh?

I don't say it is blunder or wrong that Indian girl or especially Tamil girl shouldn't do like this. Rather my beliefs and the philosophy would have taken hard hit if this had happened to me. The timely Blink saved me.

Now, all this looks very comical flash back. Never mind Life is like that. :-)