My romance with late nights

I guess the world is well split in these two groups - early risers and late night-ers. If you have a bit of human nature reading skill - you can actually make an intelligent guess about which of the two groups a person belongs to. Each group believes their lifestyle is better - needless to say that I support late night-ers! I have temporarily been an early riser as well (working in sales & distribution of newspapers) - but I never got any joy in that!

I was asked why I turned out to be a late night-er and that got me thinking - I think I do have an answer. When I was in the VI grade, my elder sis was in IX grade and she got dad's permission to read Sidney Sheldon novels. I was specifically told that I am not to touch these - and that's where late nights started. I used sit, pretending to study, until everyone had gone off to sleep and once everyone was in dreamland, I would pick up the novels and read. I found this arrangement to be the best - parents thought I was studying (scoring myself some brownie points - no marks in exams though) and reading stuff that was obviously not meant for a VI grader.

The most important impact on this habit came in XI grade - I was studying Sciences - things were tough because the level of difficulty had drastically increased from X grade. There was one Mr. Mukesh Chand Anand, my Chemistry teacher, who had one simple philosophy on the subject at hand: "raat kaali kiya karo" - roughly one could translate this as "burn the midnight oil". He explained his philosophy as: "raat tumhari hai, kal ka pata nahi" (the night is yours, who knows what happens tomorrow). This got into my head loud & clear. I may not remember anything about Chemistry, or any other subject for that matter, but I clearly remember the life lessons that I picked from my academic days.

I wouldn't say that I am a night bird to the extent of being a party animal. Far from it actually - I like late nights because I am alone. I find these few hours to be the perfect me-time, I become king of my time - I decide what to do, or not to do with it. I actually believe that my productivity is better during these late night hours. There's a reason for that - I am all alone, with nothing else to do than focus on what I have set myself to do. There are no phone calls, no meetings, nobody needs you, no fires to fight - it is just ME!

It is my love of these few hours in a day that made me try and revive my dormant blog. Time right now is well beyond 0200hrs...and I finally am satisfied with my time well spent.