The Accidental Person
At 20, Aaina jhootha hai sounds like a love song.
At 50, it begins to sound like a warning.
Because somewhere between those two ages, something uncomfortable happens.
You realise that perhaps the biggest struggle of being human isn’t between success and failure.
It is between the person you thought you would become and the person you actually became.
And most of us spend an extraordinary amount of energy trying to hide the difference.
We Invent Ourselves Before We Know Ourselves
A strange thing happens when we are young.
We decide who we are before we have enough evidence.
I am an entrepreneur.
I am an athlete.
I am an artist.
I am a rebel.
I am going to change the world.
Nobody asks for supporting documentation.
At 20, confidence is frequently just ignorance wearing good clothes.
But perhaps that ignorance is necessary.
If a 22-year-old knew exactly how difficult building a company was, fewer companies would get built.
If a first-time marathoner understood exactly what kilometre 35 felt like, fewer marathon registrations would be completed.
If aspiring actors understood the mathematics of becoming a successful actor, Mumbai would have significantly cheaper rent.
Youth needs fiction.
You need to believe that you are special before life has collected enough data to challenge the hypothesis.
And so we create a character.
Then we spend decades trying to play it.
The Entrepreneur Who Became a Businessman
Take the entrepreneur.
He starts with a beautiful idea.
He wants to disrupt an industry.
Create employment.
Build culture.
Change lives.
Perhaps even change the world.
Then somebody introduces him to something called working capital.
Suddenly revolution has a cash-flow problem.
Employees need salaries.
Customers negotiate.
Vendors call.
Taxes arrive with admirable punctuality even when customers don’t.
The founder who once discussed purpose begins discussing gross margin.
The man who wanted to change capitalism is now chasing an invoice from April.
And somewhere inside him there is embarrassment.
This wasn’t who I wanted to become.
He wanted to be an entrepreneur.
He became a businessman.
But perhaps he misunderstands what happened.
Maybe the businessman isn’t the failed version of the entrepreneur.
Maybe he is what the entrepreneur looks like after reality has finished editing him.
The Athlete Trapped Inside the Wrong Body
Then there is the person who believes he is an athlete.
His mind is absolutely certain.
His genetics have raised an objection.
Wrong muscle-fibre distribution.
Wrong biomechanics.
Wrong VO₂ max.
Wrong body type.
Somewhere nature has apparently ticked every box marked:
“Would make endurance sport unnecessarily complicated.”
Still, he trains.
Gets injured.
Recovers.
Trains again.
Gets injured somewhere more creative.
And continues.
For years he may secretly feel like a fraudulent athlete because the mirror doesn’t show what athletes are supposed to look like and the stopwatch doesn’t show the numbers he thinks athletes are supposed to produce.
But perhaps the interesting person isn’t the imaginary athlete with perfect genetics.
Perhaps it is the completely unsuitable human being who keeps turning up anyway.
That person didn’t exist in the original plan.
Life created him.
The Actor Who Never Became an Actor
A young man wants to become an actor.
He sees cinema differently from everyone else because somewhere inside every film he can see himself.
He imagines auditions becoming roles.
Roles becoming films.
Films becoming fame.
Then life happens.
Maybe talent wasn’t enough.
Maybe luck wasn’t enough.
Maybe money ran out.
Maybe responsibility arrived.
Twenty-five years later he is running a restaurant.
And he is excellent at it.
He knows every regular customer.
He remembers birthdays.
He can read a difficult table from twenty metres away.
He can calm an angry customer without humiliating an employee.
He can tell when the young waiter is distracted because something is wrong at home.
He employs forty people.
Nobody applauds when he enters the room.
There is no camera.
No credits.
No Filmfare.
And perhaps, somewhere deep inside, he still describes himself with one sentence:
“I wanted to be an actor.”
As though everything after that sentence were the consolation prize.
What if it wasn’t?
What if the tragedy isn’t that he didn’t become an actor?
What if the tragedy is that he spent twenty-five years treating the fascinating person he actually became as evidence of failure?
The Lives We Didn’t Live Become Very Powerful
By middle age, everyone carries ghosts.
The company that could have been built.
The book that could have been written.
The body that could have been fitter.
The relationship that could have survived.
The country we could have moved to.
The career we should have chosen.
The musician.
The cricketer.
The entrepreneur.
The artist.
The traveller.
The person we were supposed to become.
These imaginary people have one enormous advantage over us.
They never had to live.
So they never made mistakes.
The imaginary entrepreneur never ran out of cash.
The imaginary athlete never got injured.
The imaginary marriage never became complicated.
The imaginary parent never shouted at the children.
The imaginary artist never produced mediocre work.
The imaginary version of ourselves remains permanently perfect because reality never got the opportunity to damage it.
And then we compare that flawless fictional person with the scratched, compromised, slightly overweight, occasionally confused person standing in front of the mirror.
Naturally, reality loses.
The match was fixed.
Aaina Jhootha Hai
Perhaps that is why the line becomes different at 50.
Aaina jhootha hai.
Is it?
The mirror shows wrinkles.
We see ageing.
The mirror shows a businessman.
We see the entrepreneur who disappeared.
The mirror shows an ordinary parent.
We see all the ways we failed our children.
The mirror shows a recreational runner.
We see the athlete we never became.
The mirror shows the life that happened.
We compare it with the life that didn’t.
And then accuse the mirror of lying.
But perhaps the mirror has been innocent all along.
Perhaps the fiction was standing in front of it.
The Accidental Person
There is another possibility.
One that becomes visible only after enough years have passed.
Maybe the person you planned to become was never the interesting one.
Maybe the interesting person is the one created by everything that went wrong with the plan.
The entrepreneur who learned humility when the company almost failed.
The athlete who learned persistence because his body wasn’t gifted.
The actor who became unusually good at understanding people.
The parent who discovered that love and competence are not the same thing.
The successful executive who realised that the promotion he desperately wanted didn’t make him happier.
The person who lost someone and became gentler.
The person who failed publicly and stopped being terrified of embarrassment.
The person who changed careers at 45.
The person who started again at 52.
None of these people existed in the original blueprint.
They were created accidentally.
By failure.
By compromise.
By responsibility.
By ageing.
By luck.
By bad luck.
By people arriving.
By people leaving.
By knees.
By mortgages.
By Monday mornings.
By life.
And perhaps this is the mistake we make.
We keep asking:
“Did I become who I wanted to be?”
Maybe that’s the wrong question.
Because the person answering it has thirty years more experience than the person who wrote the original specification.
Why should a 50-year-old human being be judged against the ambitions of a 20-year-old who barely knew himself?
Imagine running a company like that.
“We created this business plan in 1996. Under no circumstances shall we revise it.”
You would be bankrupt.
Yet we do exactly that with identity.
We remain loyal to obsolete versions of ourselves.
Maybe maturity isn’t finally becoming the person you imagined.
Maybe maturity is having the curiosity to meet the person you became.
Without immediately grading him.
Without asking whether he fulfilled the plan.
Without comparing him with someone who exists only in imagination.
Just looking.
The strange combination of ambition and compromise.
Courage and cowardice.
Discipline and laziness.
Success and stupidity.
Things completed.
Things abandoned.
Things survived.
A complete clusterfuck, certainly.
But an original one.
At 20, you stand before the mirror and ask:
“Who will I become?”
At 30:
“Am I getting there?”
At 40:
“Where the hell did the plan go?”
And perhaps at 50, there is finally a better question:
“Who is this person who arrived instead?”
Look carefully.
He may not be the person you ordered.
But after fifty years of modifications, accidents, repairs, detours and questionable decisions…
he may be a far more interesting model.
Maybe Aaina jhootha hai was never really about the mirror.
Maybe the mirror was waiting patiently for us to stop showing it the person we wanted to see.
And finally notice the sachchi tasveer.
