I am a serial procrastinator. People procrastinate, but I feel I do it with a certain panache. I have a family with more degrees collectively than my age, and being the elder son, I always have had a name to live up to. And boy, I did that when I was young. Then one fine day, I came to know of an assignment we had to submit in some three hours. And I went to play, came back, copied it from a friend in fifteen minutes! I put the “ever important” part of study on hold and did what I wanted to do and I was thrilled. I wasn’t a virgin anymore. My eyes had been opened to a brand new world. A world when what you have to do comes secondary than what you want to do.

I carried on the habit in college. Even when I had the time and means to finish the curriculum for college examinations- I did it the morning before. If I had to write an article for the college magazine, I did it just before the deadline. I bought a guitar, yes, I was that stupid, and never learnt to play it. (now I do, so don’t you start being all wisely and start puffing your nose again!). I got fined from the college for trying to smuggle my own laptop because I didn’t get a stupid form signed. There’s no answer to why I didn’t get the form signed, I passed from the very door fifteen times where the forms were being signed, but I had to invest ten minutes of my time for that. How would have I found those ten minutes!
I haven’t reached for a single movie in time for the last five years – it allows for multiple beginnings – which makes the movie more exciting than it could ever have been. I think there is an element of romance in this whole topic of procrastinating.

And I have been blessed to find the people of the same genre alongside me. This fine young man, Aniket – a brilliant keyboardist- you can actually look up to him if you want to learn how to put things on hold. He could sit for the entire day doing absolutely nothing just because he had to do something. I cannot even begin to describe how amazing is that!

I have been trying to understand the importance of procrastination in my life. It has made me smarter, I suppose. I have to utilize, exert my grey cells doing something in twenty minutes, which if I had planned could be easily been done in two hours. It has made me understand the value of concentration. Normally, my mind is always in the thinking mode – about the pressing issues in the world, such as, why are the clouds white, or how I can make tiny particles appear out of thin air when I shut my eyes and open them again, or how can we know if there’s a black person on a moonless night hiding in the woods – but after the process of delaying things, I would have thought of all of these- and then finished the work! How amazingly awesome is that !

I think you’ll understand by this pictorial display.
What I feel like when I (have to) finish something before time:

What I feel like when I finish something last minute:

Now, I had been thinking of writing this article for so long. But then. You know the story. You know what must have happened. Oh, procrastination! you beauty ! 😀