Ticking Thirty

Turning thirty is just about turning thirty. Possibly everywhere. Everywhere but India. How do I know? Personal experience, bruh! As a kid growing up, there’s a lot of dreams that are embedded deep inside you, thanks to the hilariously dysfunctional combination of peer pressure, societal expectations and parental advisory. In India and India alone, you can be too young to date at twenty-three but old enough to file for IT returns. But, nothing, and absolutely nothing beats the exaggerating amounts of hopes and dreams that revolve around the idea of turning thirty. It’s this one stop solution to every problem your life’s ever had, up until now: from broken relationships to thinning hairlines to near-empty bank accounts, turning thirty is about all of this magically transforming into something, just something, something that no parent quite clearly ever tells you about. And that precisely is the Catch 22. This novel is an attempt to narrate the journey of someone caught at a similar crossroad, and how turning thirty did in fact transform life: for better or for worse, is up to you, or just your perception (if I was being utterly poetic!).