Poor Punctual Palaniswamy...

Part of the same Era...

Well.. continuing from where i left off...
I am stuck in nostalgia. I can remember vividly my first day in college. Where my parents wanted to find me the most genteel, naive and religious roommates possible. To my horror initially i thought they succeeded in finding three such people who were gonna share my room. To theirs, they learnt four years later that they couldn't have been more wrong! And well i could never have been more happier with their flawed sense of character judgement! :) Especially Sai( the stud in our room) and I share a unique trait, a guilt free conscience when it comes to avoiding all academic activities! We bunked an afternoon one week into coll because we were too tired to go down the stairs and walk from hostel to the college. We spent the entire afternoon listening to a washed, jaded summer of 69 by B Adams and sleeping off somewhere in the middle.. Thus began our exciting adventurous life!

Four years has seen me grow from a boy into a man..(he hee..i always wanted to use this sentence.. all good farewell speeches and youth stories have this.. Its corny.. cheesy and cliched.. .hmm..true too if u can look beyond all that). Hostel life was the best thing to have happened to a lazy bum such as me(It made me more lazy.. in case u were thinking i had changed). Responsibility, independence, adaptability.. all the other good stuff that u can write on ur statement of purpose :) happened. It taught me maturity. Pleasee trust me! Its true...It did.. it did.. I am a more mature kid now.. i no longer think girls are aliens! ;) oops.. may be not so mature enough to avoid saying that in public.. :)

Its a miracle how many things u learn in coll. Another miracle how it never relates to acads... By the end of my first semester, we had learned to treat unit tests and periodicals as important as ear wax, find all the hang out spots, bunk with precision to avoid the most torturous classes, utilize the local transportation facilities with max efficiency, watch two movies consecutively with an headache in a rundown decrepit theatre and find innovative ways to avoid work.

Its an ERA!

Yup.. I've decided to write about the end of an era.. by the way i am writing this off the cuff.. so i may meander off from what i am trying to say in the middle. This post is gonna be full of stray thoughts, random musings, incoherent scenes, with no central theme and no prissy grammar.

To begin with... to people who think the word era has been misused here... let me quote directly from the sitcom 'Friends' - An era is a significant period of time. Period. Go to hell!:) and i can find no other four years of my life more significant than the ones i spent in undergrad.. life altering and transformative! oh oh.. by the way i am an engineer now ;). coming back to the topic.

Memories are fun. Its a way of reliving your past. And after four years, I know I have enough memories to cherish and live life fully. I am not a pious person. My school of thought deviates from the norm. It goes against two conventional ideas for mortal well being..
1)Its doesn't do well to dwell on memories and 2)Man must rid himself of attachment!

Memories remind us there were times in our lives when we have hit rock bottom.. but we are still standing. It tells us we have overcome our worst times. Gives us hope to face tough situations in the future with or without the experiences gained from the past. Happy memories remind us that we have lived life to the fullest. we know what it means to be in a state of bliss and feel on top of the world and that we can expect such good moments again in our life. Memories give us hope and hope to me is more important than any other thing in my life!
I am attached to everything.. be it my first cycle, my camera, my childhood toy, my fav movie, my first book... And i dont think its silly! I did get attached to my rooms in college. I still miss the coll and classes life. I am attached to my roommates... and in my case I am fortunate that i gained in them some of the best friends for life. My justification for attachment is simple. The following story should illustrate it. I watched a jackie chan movie recently where Jackie plays an immortal guy who befriends a boy. Jackie is wounded in battle when he gives this speech. It goes something like this...

The boy says "Hold on...You cant die."
Jackie -"No i can die. " The boy surprised, says "Its not possible you said you were immortal!".
Jackie -" I am immortal. I am not the monk who says 'Free yourselves from earthly possessions. Be devoid of attachments. Seek isolation. Live a life of solitude and you can gain peace and longevity.' cause though such a man can actually live for eternity, can u consider such a man to have actually lived?? Does such a life actually give satisfaction? I prefer to drink wine, dance, make friends, travel, laugh till my stomach aches, eat till my stomach is full and sleep on a comfortable couch. I prefer loving a woman and attaching myself to a person. Living for them,living through them. That in my view is a life well lived. . I am immortal as i live in your memory. This is possible only through attachments. If you are attached to something u leave a trace of u behind in it. This makes u immortal." ..Yeah profound eh! seriously back in the theatre i would have preferred jackie's kicking the bad guy's ass with some cool spewing snake necking giraffe move!:)

In summation, two punch dialogues... 1) If nostalgia is a disease, i am glad i am a sick man.
2) Mortality is more immortal than immortality. :) ah ha!