Update your bucket list… by Pritish Nandy

Everyone has a bucket list. I made my first one at 5. But the question is: How much of your bucket list at 5 or 15 or 45 have you really pulled off? That’s where I have failed. All the big things I set out to do, I am pretty much done with. But all the small things, the ones that really excite me, I have missed out on the way. It’s no use trying to climb Kilimanjaro if you can’t make a perfect Spanish omelette. Most of us don’t figure this out till it’s too late. And the reason is: We have all been programmed to perpetually hunt down and fulfil the big tasks of life. By the time we get down to the fun stuff, the successes have taken their toll and we have lost the ability to see the smaller things, let alone enjoy them. Would Sachin, after breaking all those world records and making all that money, get time to go back to his childhood stamp collection and find a Penny Black?

That’s the problem with success. In fact, that’s the problem with our lives. We are always chasing The Big Dream. It’s only when you fulfil your larger than life ambitions that you realise how hollow they actually were. Ask Bill Gates. Or Warren Buffet. When they realised how boring it was to reach the pinnacle of wealth, they turned to charity. They are now spending double the time and effort they spent on amassing their wealth on trying to get rid of it in the name of philanthropy. They should be actually wondering why they didn’t do it in the first place, like Mother Teresa. She created the biggest empire of charity in the world with Rs 10, a pair of blue bordered white saris, a bucket and a mug to call her own and she did a damned good job of it.

It’s these small things in our bucket list that are the most important. You miss them even more when you succeed with the big ones. And if you don’t succeed with the big ones, it’s worse. You consume your whole life chasing them. In the process, the real stuff goes MIA. And those are the things that make life worth living. Any idiot can make lots of money, and many do. Just look around you and see if I am wrong. Would you really like to spend your whole life migrating from a BMW to an Audi or a Dior to a Bottega, or would you prefer to take a chance and choose a life that allows you to experience the magic, the vastness, the excitement of being on this amazing planet? One of the things in life I miss out on doing is what Bear Grylls keeps doing all the time. Like entering the Mojave Desert hanging inverted under a biplane at 8,000 feet. Since you can’t skydive from a biplane, the pilot flips the plane upside down and drops you out. Now that’s something I would like to experience. I would love to be lost in the middle of an Amazon rainforest, be it in Brazil or Peru or Columbia, trying to find my way out. Or find myself in Aokigahara, the Sea of Trees at the base of Mount Fuji, where not only wild animals but also the great demons reside.

I would have liked to play chess better than I do. Or solve the Riemann Hypothesis or the Hodge Conjecture, problems that cleverer men than me have struggled over unsuccessfully for years. I would have liked to challenge Blake Edwards, film director and brilliant card shark who died last December, to a game of blackjack. He had boasted he could take anyone to the cleaners in a game of cards and make love to a woman at the same time. I am sure, with practise, I could improve on that. I wish I could converse better with dogs, particularly the ones roaming the street outside my home. They are my best friends and yet I barely speak their language. I would like to try a séance, play the mandolin, do street magic like Chriss Angel, have an occasional chat with God, backpack through Uttarakhand, bake the perfect lemon tart, sing a song (any song) in tune. These are things I always wanted to do.

They are not really all that small, when you look back at them. But then nothing on your bucket list is ever big or small. It’s what you make of them. Life’s about choices. Most of us are so busy chasing our standard template dreams that we never notice the ones on the sideline. It’s only when you get back to your list or update it from time to time that you notice all the stuff you missed out on. And then, all that you actually achieved looks so trite, trivial and unnecessary that you wish you had another shot at life.