It's purely academic

Ok so I've been lazy. I find it very easy to be lazy, unfortunately. But here I am, fighting my natural inclination to be a sloth, and writing about my beloved elder brother instead. ooh aren't I the sweetest :-)

Ok so I am not. He was easily the better person and certainly loved me more and showed it better too. Not that he didn't have any flaws, and we definitely had our rough patches, but he was still the best big brother ever. He's only 20 months older than me and we had the best childhood together. There are plenty of incidents from our Dunlop and Rajasthan days that I could write about and I will at some stage, but I will save them for a future post.

This one's about more recent memories... we were always close growing up, but our mid-teens did not go very well at all. We fought a lot; he became a domineering and controlling big brother all of a sudden, a complete change from the mild-mannered boy who had let me boss over him all my life, and I have to say I truly hated him for a while back then.

Thankfully that phase didn't last forever. He finished school and left for BITS (Birla Institute of Technology and Science), Pilani, many miles away, and came back after his first semester a changed guy. He wanted to be friends again, but as my parents (and some of my exes!!) know only too well, I am incredibly stubborn and find it quite easy to be coldly unforgiving. So it took 2 more trips and numerous pleas to be forgiven before I finally "deigned" to do so and we were back to being best of friends just like that. (Although I continued to remind him every now and again about how mean he had been to me, and he would be suitably contrite each time!)

By this time I was nearing the end of Year 12 at school, and Bozo, who was quite happy at BITS, wanted me to join him there, never mind that I was too lazy and/or not smart enough to get in. He would keep looking up courses he thought I might enjoy, but while I did like the idea of studying at the same University as him, I had no illusions about my intelligence/academic commitment, and decided to study Hotel Management instead. While this decision did disappoint him a little, and he continued to try and "sell" BITS to me each time I visited, he quickly progressed to being highly enthusiastic about my hoteliering achievements.

Like the time I happened to come first in my Cookery Finals in my First Year (purely by chance, seriously... my Professor was as surprised as I was). Despite knowing the full story, Dada went and boasted about his "talented" little sister to his friends, which I discovered on a subsequent trip to Pilani around Diwali with my parents, elder Aunt and cousin Manu. During this visit, some friends of his were cooking Tandoori chicken, and Dada told them very confidently that I would be able to tell them exactly what to do, being the culinary expert I was. I vaguely remember a disagreement over how long the chicken should be marinated for, and Dada laughed at them for not listening to me. A few hours later, I was embarrassed when the friends said quite smugly (and justifiably so) that the chicken had turned out just fine, but he insisted it would have been far better if they had followed my instructions.

The best big brother ever, as I said.

Note: I would like to assure everyone (especially my mother!) that I do not suffer from low self-confidence/self-esteem. It's just that there was an undeniably large difference between our levels of intelligence, coupled with the fact that he quite liked studying, whereas I had no interest in it whatsoever until I went for my MBA. So while theoretically I could have gained admission into BITS, it certainly wouldn't have been as effortless as it was for him, and I most definitely did not want to work hard enough for it. And that's ok too.