What do I want to do with my life?

That is the question of the year. Rahter, it’s more like the question of my life. I was born clueless, and it's not like anything has changed much after twenty two years either. The thing is, everyone else I know has their future all planned out for themselves, and they’re already doing great and accomplishing what they’ve always wanted to accomplish. I can’t even remember having an ambition I decided to stick with for the rest of my life. For me it has always been making decisions on the spur of the moment.

I remember wanting to be an artist. This was probably my very first career option.

It wasn't until a few years later that wanted to be a teacher, just like my grade 2 class-teacher Ms. Chitra deMel. Unfortunatley I also had to face the facts: I didn’t have enough sarees to even get through one academic year. The only sarees I had were the bedsheets.

Later, about a year later, with the coming of documentary television shows to our household, I developed what you would call ‘an exploratory phase’. The shows about Earth and its origins, ancient civilizations and the amazingly confuddling history of mankind intrigued me so much that I insisted my birthday presents just had to be books on palaeontology, anthropology, history, or geography. It was the perfect recipe for ultimate nerdiness... I made sure I invited as many of my classmates as my parents would allow, and I reminded each one of them to buy me books or anything related to my historical explorative fantasy phase thing. At that time I wanted to be a palaeontologist.

A year later I had become fully accustomed to sharing my life as an only child with two tiny pink things that I would come to acknowledge as my brothers. During this critical year I enjoyed wrapping as many clean nappies as I could find around my littlest brother’s arms and legs and tying them up to the bars of the cot he slept in. I wrote him prescriptions and I kept a medical report chart hung at the foot of his cot. One of the prescriptions was a bottle labled 'Frog Juice; 2 tsp daily after meals'. He was to have ‘bad joints’ for as long as he was under my care, and he proved to be a very willing patient. The other brother wasn’t very hospital-inclined. This was the year I wanted to be a doctor. With patients on hand I decided I could practice my medical skills freely and without any legal licence. I also didn’t have to worry about insurance. My brother was too young to hire a lawyer and I felt sure that my parents would never report their only darling daughter for malpractice. It was a foolproof plan and I decided to stick with it.

About two years later my 'destiny' took me to the shelves of the second-hand bookshop at Qurum: The House of Prose. There I had my first encounter with what was to become one of my favourite novel series ever: The Mystery Club. And try as I may, I could never remember the name of the author. But it was from these books that I learnt about drugs, copyright infringement laws, forgery, art thievery, plastic explosives, bad babysitting, ransom notes, and watermarks. I now wanted to be a detective. This was probably one of my longest lasting resolutions ever (besides wanting to be a great novelist, something which still sort of has a hold on me). The ‘resolve’ to be a Forensic Scientist stayed with me till three years ago until I realized that I just didn’t have the brains or the commitment to get into Forensic Science. Organic Chemistry was not my thing, and I hadn’t read enough books about how to study correctly. I have yet to pick up a Studying-for-Dummies guidebook.

Ah, and here I am now, a graduate in Biochemistry, applying for a graduate degree in Immunology, and still not knowing how to pick up from there. I’m a teacher now, teaching Biology and Chemistry (complicated Organic not included) and I think I really like it. But my family and my huge other family of relatives want me to do something ‘greater’ than teaching.

Perhaps I should just get married.

But then again, perhaps even that would take me a lifetime to decide.