I was watching Hum Aapke Hain Koun last night – for maybe the fifth time. Its wonderful for a certain kind of depression, when you get all caught up in the complicated business of life, when everything you do or not do has half a dozen reason attached to it, HAHK is a big relief. Saw it when I was in college, liked it then, too. HAHK talks about a big business-type family – it has references to people setting up huge factories and starting industries. But none of the characters, when they come home, seem the least bit worried about their work. The focus of the movie is on the personal relationships of all these people, and somehow other responsibilities, or past lives, or occasional visitors, don’t seem to interfere at all.

Me, somehow I’m always struggling to balance ten dozen things going on my mind all the time, and usually not succeeding. When you read in the newspapers about these young prodigies who made it big, or who achieved whatever feat, the article always makes it seem as if they had decent blocks of uninterrupted time to do their stuff in. Dunno how they found that time. Right now as I write this : Mom’s feeling under the weather; I need to prepare for another quiz; the multithreading algorithm of the project I’m on needs revising, the ache to find a good circle of friends gnaws at me, as always; there are three books at home which I’m halfway through; any number of incomplete writing projects, and two blogs, beckon; my marriage is on my entire family’s mind; the decision on whether I want to work in a products company needs to be made; how am I going to lose weight??? ; How do I pay back the loans on my head?; God knows what else. You realize of course that this is a gross simplification; each of these thoughts is a multithreaded one in itself, each thread capable of swallowing up days of work. How to separate time for any one of these from all the others? I have no idea, and I suppose no one else does, either; everyone just muddles through, managing as best as he can.

Except Salman Khan in HAHK, of course.