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.