Bye bye, 2012...

It’s the 18^th of December, and the year is rapidly drawing to a close. I was just as busy or lazy as I have been for ages, and yet the year has zipped by so fast that I can hardly believe my eyes when I look at the calendar and see that it’s time for my year-end holiday again. I have stepped into my fiftieth year; my daughter has grown up to finish secondary school, and in another ten years’ time I can definitely start thinking of myself as an old man, and acting accordingly, demanding from the world the consideration that old age can expect after having lived through decades of hard and continuous work and paid my dues. Even the government will start giving me the privileges legally due to a senior citizen, fancy that!

On the whole this has been a pretty uneventful year, not just for myself but for mankind as a whole (discounting the possibility that the world will be destroyed in three days’ time). Of course there have been the usual chills, thrills and spills, Olympics and terrorist attacks and continuing wars and celebrity hatches, matches and despatches, but little that would be remembered as major historical landmarks (do tell me if you think otherwise, referring to specific incidents that you consider world changing – only if you have a historical consciousness, of course, and don’t imagine that the launch of iPhone 5 too is a phenomenon worth noting). My generation is reaching the age when no news is likely to be good news, so I am glad that this was another year that passed quietly, smoothly, without too many and too nasty hiccups. And that I found a lot of time for myself, reading, watching movies, writing, chatting up old boys, walking and swimming and meditating…

In a comment on the first post of the year, I wrote “the rest of the story will be my daughter’s”. Well, my wife’s too, actually, because she’s building up her own career with gusto now. So as my daughter grows more independent and career oriented, and the family depends less and less on my income, I can look forward to easing up gradually, and turn my attention to doing things I love doing more. What I’d love to do most, of course, is what the place I live in has still not grown used to giving me on a large enough scale – mentoring and giving quality companionship to children and those not so young, rather than tutoring for this or that examination; something that I have always been good at and enjoyed hugely, something that I have always considered the best and most important part of my work as a teacher, something that is the essential thing, I believe, that the scores of young people who have been positively affected by my classes remember and miss and keep coming back for, when all the course material that I taught has been long forgotten, something that I have always done for a few people at a time, with and without payment, for ages now, something that I regard as my USP and know for a fact that precious few teachers can provide these days, at the kindergarten level or the university. Let’s see whether I can mould my services more and more into that shape with the passage of years, and whether there grows a sizeable enough market for it. That will be my next big adventure!

And with that I bow out for a while. This may quite possibly be the last post of this year.