A Quartet recalled

Memories hit hard sometimes. Nostalgia bugs me down as I recall my college days. A similar nostalgia bugged me when I was leaving my beloved school, friends and teachers for a newer, bigger and a hectic institution called college. A new set of friends, professors and professionals awaited me. The start was traumatic. Seriously! No friends, no fun and language barricade, as I studied in the state university, haunted me. It took time to settle down in the new life, to make new friends, breathe happily in new air. It was around mid-2nd year when I found my league, my friends! A bunch of the most hilarious, mad and absolutely nonchalant freaks whom, I now, promisingly and with whole my heart call, my dearest friends! :) Without them I was just breathing, with them, life started.

The final year was both the best and the worst. Fewer subjects, less assignments, minimum exams and maximum pressure! That is how I can sum it up. By the time I reached the fourth year, the admin staff had started handing me the stamps like a casual pen, for all the bonafide and certificate stamping, which we took in fat bundles! Project training was an amazing and a learning experience, which exposed me to a whole new world of research, its pressures, cycle and rules. It was hectic, cruel at times, but rewarding in totality. I still miss those deadlines, the hour long simulations I ran on the desktop and the clumsy software my fingers experimented with.

Attendance, a sacred need in colleges, was not an issue at all. Who goes to college in the final year? We were seniors, rather, super seniors or should I call veterans of our college. The guides, the perfect philosophers, friends and vanguards of the campus crowd. It was a time of too much studies but we had more recreation than exams. I may lose count of the films I saw in theatres, always the leading ones (read the chillars sitting in front rows).  Back then, it was a tumultuous time for our lovers too. No more college meant, no more back bench romance, no more khopcha love, and no more college parties!

At this juncture of a fast fading student life and an awaiting professional set up, our days saw the high and low tides of emotions. It was like the crest and troughs of a sine wave. We were like the shores of Marine Drive, getting wet and dry by the clock.

Whatever is penned here, is in complete sync with what thousands of my fresher friends feel world over. But when a beautiful journey as this, comes to an end, a Pandora’s box opens, to stock and pile up your memories, emotions and experiences, only to be opened up in later lives and reminisced. Later, it seems a transient time.

Abraham Lincoln remarked once, “And in the end it's not the years in your life that count; it's the life in your years.” I am glad, I had a life worth recalling, worth cherishing.