When I grow up....

Title sounds too mystifying to be said by a 22 yr old..right? Well..today while I was wracking my brains(excuse me,why do we use a plural here???:-o) about what I should be writing in my second blog , I had 2 choices ...either to write about the gory details of the "battle" I had today in the morning in the "arena" (a.k.a The Bathroom) with my opponent (a deadly sized creature with sturdy claws and a menacingly long tentacle,firmly sticking to my bath towel) or...something much less gory..the multitudes of ways I used to complete this sentence "When I grow up,I want to be a.." in the past years..I chose the latter.
As some great PJ master said.."Let me begin from the beginning.."..

My first day in school as a 4 yr old...I remember very little of that day except for this incident.The teacher in blue sari (She was pretty,but I always thought my mom was the prettiest in those days...! ) asked all of us to answer a question.."What do you want to be when you grow up?" Initially none of us got her question.Then she suggested.."like..teacher..doctor...??" Many around me flashed smiles,probably because they got their answer...but I was still have the same puzzled face.My classmates started answering her question..one by one.."teacher..".."doctor.."..."doctor..".."teacher.."...somebody said "pilot" (and I wondered what in the world was that!) ...my turn was fast approaching...and I had still not got the answer...I could feel my hands going cold...what am I to say????

Then the person right ahead of me said "Doctor" and immedietely I sprang to my feet and said "teacher..",for the only reason that my friend had said "doctor" and how can I say the same thing????..I sat down and relaxed for having answered the question.
That was my first way of ending that sentence...when I didn't even know what the question meant!
Soon as I "grew up" inch by inch,I fancied doing all kinds of jobs...After what I thought was careful thought,I decided to stick to the teacher figure for quite some years..until I was about 8 or 9 yrs old.I had narrowed down my dream to a "KV teacher" cos I was a KV student.

Then when I was 10 yrs old,teacher announced one day in class that there was this essay competition in school and the topic was "My Ambition in Life"..hmm..why not participate! Back home,I was pestering dad to come up with an "exotic" profession so that I could win the first prize ;-)..and both of us put our heads together and decided that I should be writing an essay saying I wanted to become an "articket"..i mean..an "architect"..with great difficulty I managed to pronounce the word. Soon a nice essay was prepared by daddy and I memorized every line of it in no time!

Voila!!! The essay won the second prize...(I secretly wondered what "extra-exotic" profession the 1st prize winner had come up with!) ..and that day I decided I would become an architect!!!
Those were merry days....cos even though I changed my mind few times,I still secretly hoped to become an architect when I grew up...

The other jobs that caught my attention were..and the weird reasons why were...
1) News reader...cos I had a crush on almost all the news readers in my teens and dreamt of reading news with them!
2) An anchor for cookery shows in TV because I envied those people on Tv who managed to get along without cooking,but still dug their teeth into all the yummy things the chefs cook!
3) An aerobics teacher because I thought that was the only way somebody who didn't know the ABCs of dancing would dance and the world would still not laugh at them!
4) And finally a software engineer (which today I am)....cos...:-)

And today,as I look back on all the clumsy thoughts I had,I still think of all those dreams-unrealized,with a smile on my face...may be one day I can fufill them....??? And the equally clumsy fact is that I have still not stopped uttering the statement "When I grow up.." even today...!!!! have a nice day!!!