Living the dream...

Got this interesting article in today TOI, interesting observations:

At last, a dream job offer! "You have a job offer! Would you like to be a police officer? Please click on the link below," said an email from an old friend. A dream job, what with all that i could collect including the royal salutes i would get, i thought. But who would offer someone on the wrong side of 50 a job in the police force, i wondered? Had my old friend married the police chief's daughter, i tried to recollect – and in any case, why would my friend who had not bothered to keep in touch all these years except for a friend request on a social networking site, want to pass on this opportunity to me?

Never mind, i told myself – if he had such a lucrative offer for me, it was for me to grab it and enjoy the good times that come along with it, not to question it to extinction. I would begin my day with the kanda-poha at the 'zunka bhakar' stall, which incidentally did not sell any zunka-bhakar. I could now amble into the closest sabzi mandi and the vendors squatting there would hand over a bunch of the green veggies – all for free! All the farm produce would be my privilege, although out of reach for the common man on the street – real farm produce, mind you, the stuff which we sit down to at lunch and relish, not the colourful, exotic ones on Farmville. Then i would be entitled to my pav-bhaji at the street corner vendor who had put up his stall in the middle of the road flouting all urban rules. Several 'chai-paani's awaited me!

Being a cop, i would no more be the aam admi reeling under the burden of the spiralling food price index that stoked the inflation fire in our country. I
would be khaas – not aam! No more meaningless ranting about rising prices on my blog – just do the daily beats around town and find your choicest picks for your family's living needs. I was elated. I had always regretted not having chosen the enviable IRS or IAS career options at the appropriate juncture in my career. It could've been a great life if i had, what with plum postings and lucrative inflows guaranteed to come my way, which was assured once i was deeply ensconced in the bureaucratic race.

I even convinced myself about how i was cut out for the job – being suspicious in nature, i was not the kind to fall into the trap of the several forms of windfalls – of millions of dollars and pounds to be claimed – by way of inheritance, lotteries or for simply being the claimant of my email account, which i was often informed to be a lucky one. Never the easy pawn for such clever trappings, one had always avoided responding to such spurious offers.

One had also been wiser by the steady advice from friends which warned me about the perils of clicking on files with bizarre sounding titles like 'Black President in the White House' or any other enticing titles. But this was a lucrative job offer!
So what was i waiting for when life's greatest opportunity was a knock, er, a click away? Click! A new window opened up to Citiville, another game on the social networking site, Facebook, on the lines of Farmville and Fishville. "Allow access?" it asked me, when, thankfully, realisation dawned upon me – that i would have to make do with the onions without stench and live on that Farmville produce, and bid goodbye to the moolis and the moolah i was dreaming about!