Of cocktails and graphs...

Everyone's life is a cocktail. Each ones cocktail differs from the other's.

Well..I may just sound like yet another of those innumerable homosapiens who love
to ponder upon the true meaning of life. But any other better statement coming out of the mashed matter which my brain is at the moment would just about qualify for the achievement of the century.

After a long stint of relentless work, after guzzling down nearly the whole of the insides of the coffee machine, after hours of sitting infront of the computer trying to make sense out of code which to me a month back seemed like the epitome of perfect reasoning and logic in the making...the best i can manage is the above statement.

And after all...life is but a cocktail. Some people just dont have the punch in theirs.....while others just get heady with one sip. For some time I try to be an analyst...more like the managers who spend the late hours of the day in office with those graphs and charts, trying to decide the best way of action for maintaining the liquidity level..or simply deciding whether the lady with the bright red lipstick in cubicle 4 makes a better choice to be booted out of the company than the short nerdy man in cubicle 6. Only its not liquidity level or any employee id:12344 thats being analysed at the moment. Just am trying to analyse the composition of the cocktail that I was talking about which I happen to have in my glass at the moment.

There it is....the graph as I can clearly see it circling the rim of my glass...snaking all along the way. Looks like the ones I used to copy paste from some site right onto my project reports in college. Well it does have more curves than you can ever expect at Milan Fashion Week.

There you go...a mix of late hours into the textbooks and early hours in the coaching classes. Hmm....more of content and less of punch. Typical drink for the
first time visitors to the pub. Slow and steady rise...!! A tumultuous stretch lasting for around 3 to 4 years equivalent of the rim. High in places and meandering like a dying river in the rest. The type of combination that one expects when the visits to the pub start figuring more frequently on one's calendar and when all the sense of adventure is poured generously into the glass. More like a fiery tequilla with a slice of lime on the highs while plain old tomato juice with a dash of pepper and tabasco on the lows....!!! And then peaking for a stretch of about 6 months...seeing new highs...seeking to shoot up and away from the rigid boundary that is the rim of the glass. A combination like never tasted and tried. A combination which only a person on buddy terms with the bartender would dare to try.

A cocktail which fires up the insides with just one sip giving a hangover enough to last a lifetime, stronger than even all the martinis, vodkas and tequillas from all the taverns of the world put together and an olive to top it all. And then I see a steep fall...!! Gauging its length, seems like almost a weeks equivalent in time. No punch, no kicks..more like a citrus punch - the only punch it has is in the name. More like a person trying to adapt to a no-alocohol kind of life after the doctor has put an expiry date tag on the liver after a thorough checkup. And then abruptly the graph stops....there is no information, no figures, no status reports to go on.

The lights go off...the analyst locks his office. He has a satisfied look on his face. He has just analysed the past thru the graphs which are now safely locked away in his mind, each rise and fall burned in his head just like the nerds in the cubicles burn MP3s on the cds after office hours. But yet he is clueless about the future. Each day comes and goes...the graph has to go on circling the rim of the glass...spiralling down the stem until it comes to a point when it can't go on.
And when the last drop of cocktail has been downed and all the colored bottles of liquer cleared from the bar, when the drinks spilt by the inebriated few have been wiped away, there stands the empty glass with the peaks and troughs - a testimony of a life which was.