For me it’s almost an out of body experience where I look [down] at myself in a particular instant and I try to work backwards to the events that led up to it. It seems to be happening a lot, of late, and it always comes back to the same question. Two weeks ago, I was sitting in the domestic terminal at the Bombay airport, reading a book of no consequence and listening to my iPod while waiting for my flight to Pune when I suddenly looked up and thought to myself, “what the fuck am I doing here? How the hell did I get here?”

It happened again yesterday. I was sitting in my hotel room, eating a fabulous lunch (brunch, really, but it was 3pm; scrambled eggs, french toast, hash browns, chicken sausage, and hot chocolate) and looking out the window, out over the gloomy sprawl of Chennai before me, when it came up again: “what the fuck am I doing here? How the hell did I get here?”

There’s an obvious answer (I’m here for Operative as their resident software ninja, blah, blah) but that’s not good enough. It doesn’t really answer the question as to why I’m here, in the here and now. Even more, I can think of lots of reasons that I shouldn’t be here; why I should be somewhere else, doing something else. And only a few reasons (e.g., conscious decisions I’ve made) for being here.

And yet here I am.