I SAY I AM 22

I say I am 22. It’s been some time I am doing that. I turned 23 on 29^th October ,2012. And I realized it some moments ago. A friend of mine said he did the same himself. I have this strange union with this number ‘23’. Ever since, David Beckham went to play for Real Madrid and had this number on his back, I got addicted to this umber. It’s like I am married to this number, only it sounds crazy. Then Beckham went to play elsewhere and that number got retained in my memory.

I have an idea about, why I didn’t want to shift ahead of ‘22’? Twenty three sounds hell more of a responsibility than just a number that signals age in this regard.  ‘23’ means, get all your shit together and hunt for a job. It is time to scrutinize the newspaper, find a job that will rip all your heart out and still pay less. It means, I cuff my hands to the second hand on the clock and make up to it’s pace. It’s about time; I give up my classy sleeping routine and wake up on alarms. It means people start talking about your wage, compare it to the random rich people and make you feel like shit.  It’s time to get all shitty. So, I don’t want to turn ‘23’.

A random website on numerology, explaining the significance of ‘22’ says that it is a very special number in Numerology. It was said ‘master’ number by Pythagorous. It is very auspicious for the creative phenomena and somehow it has something to do with lunar waves as well. It has a presence of higher moon energy number ‘20’ and its lower form number ‘2’. It is very powerful due to strong lunar waves. Somewhere in the middle of this line‘ But most human being of this age have no greater magnetic field around them to utilize this powerful energy into constructive actions.’  I sensed melancholy, a tragedy of our generation. A perceptible number of young folks of my age in my town think they are cool. They have this false impression because they own a bike, it is well modified and the helmet is costly too. Their phones and all the accessories they possess have -‘i’-as an initial alphabet. They have weird sense of dressing and strange Korean names as a sobriquet. Girls on the other hand own a scooter and look prettier even with the weird dressing sense. Girls have gone crazily preoccupied with Korean dramas and are attracted to those Korean dressed Nepalese. These guys are living happily ever after and I am the only one that finds it tragic.

I found it more tragic when I remembered from this talk show with Miss Nepal 2013, Miss Ishani Shrestha not being able to recognize Pushpa Basnet. She was asked to say out the names of the people on the photographs shown to her and she didn’t know Puspha Basnet. I don’t know if this talk show made a headline next day, but I felt sorry for her. She could speak very good English though and she would enunciate this word ‘like’ all the time. Young hearts of Kathmandu, RJs, DJs, VJs and the kind of people you meet on the parties, everybody says ‘like’. Some with excellent use of English language, rest with a fine mixture of mother tongue. ‘like yesto huncha ni, like k tyo hunchani’ , I hear this all the time.

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg became the youngest ever billionaire at the age of 23. In 22^nd year of his life, he must have had a greater magnetic field around him to utilize this powerful energy into constructive actions. He is definitely the coolest guy world has ever known. He created facebook that almost every people having an internet access are an account holder of. He is a different tale, a success story from United States. This story might not be equivalent to any other stories in our country. But, he is a result of talking ideas instead of bikes and phones. When heads talk more about innovation, creativity and passion than helmets and mobile accessories billionaire like Zuckerberg is likely to be born in our country too. If focus on ‘like’ in a sentence is channeled to likes in poetry, novels , science, dramas ,reading newspapers or at least watching news on TV, Miss Nepal would not have hard time figuring out who Pushpa Basnet was.  If someone asks me, how old I am? I am still going to reply, ‘22’. I want to utilize this powerful energy into constructive actions too and contemplate the changes in me.