ABHISHEK's VIEW

Today, I was talking to an old friend. Not someone I speak to every day. Not someone who knows what I had for breakfast or where I went on vacation. In fact, we can go months without talking. Life happens. Work happens. Families happen. Responsibilities pile up. And yet, when we finally speak, it feels as though we simply pressed "play" after a long pause. During our conversation, she apologized for not keeping in touch. I told her it was okay. Because it truly was. At this stage of life, I understand that people are carrying battles I know nothing about. I understand that silence is not always neglect. Sometimes it is simply survival. But after that conversation ended, a thought stayed with me. Not because she hadn't called. Not because we had drifted apart. But because I realized how much I still value my friendships. And how little I know whether those friendships value me back. When I look back at my life, I see friends scattered across different chapters. School frie...

  There was a time when airports felt like milestones in my life. Every boarding pass felt like proof that I was moving ahead. New countries. Better opportunities. Bigger dreams. I had the chance to travel to Canada five times on work assignments. For someone coming from a middle-class Indian background, it felt surreal. Life there was good. The roads were cleaner. The systems worked. The salary was better. And somewhere between office deadlines and weekend grocery runs, I started believing that maybe this was the life everyone dreams about. Then came another opportunity - this time in United Kingdom . And honestly, I fell in love with that place. Not because it was foreign. But because life finally felt balanced. For the first time in years: I was fit. I was mentally calmer. I had time for myself. I was sleeping better. I was living instead of just surviving. I still remember those quiet evenings after work. No constant rush. No endless noise. Just a strange pe...

A few days ago, something small happened. Small on the surface. Massive inside my head. I was sitting with a few younger teammates discussing a new tool, some AI workflow, some new framework that seems to trend every week now. The conversation was fast. Too fast. They were throwing terms around effortlessly while I was still processing half of them. Then came the joke. “Sir, you are an oldie now.” “You won’t catch up with us.” Everyone laughed. I smiled too. But something inside me quietly broke. The strange thing about words is that sometimes they don’t hurt because they are cruel. They hurt because a small part of you already fears they might be true. That evening, I sat alone staring at my laptop screen long after work had ended. And for the first time in many years, I questioned whether I still belonged in tech. I am 40 years old. A Data Engineer with more than a decade of experience. I have survived technology shifts, production outages, cloud migrations, impossible deadlines, tox...