Flashbacks of a Fool - Missing my Wonder Years

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
- Anais Nin

I knew I would go through this phase, no matter how much I tried running away from this. For the past three months I would wake up from my deep slumber and go through the drill of getting ready to work in a state of drowsiness. Today as I was getting ready to work , a sense of emptiness hit me, something I’ve been avoiding for the past one month, the feeling that Iam starting to miss my college life. My college was shitty, it was nothing like the “B-School” that it claimed to be in its brochure, though it was a far from perfect "B-school" it was its rustic self  that I missed . There are some times in life when you are meant to follow a path, it’s part of a destiny that you can’t fight. And when you choose this path, your life collides with a person who makes a huge impact on your life. Now when I look back, I feel like I was meant to take this route, I was meant to study in this college, for I didn’t meet one, but I met a dozen people to whom I owe some really wonderful moments of my life.

My college life was a roller-coaster ride of emotions, there were times when I felt like I was living a soap opera, hell, it can even be made into a movie, and if written as a book it would be a best seller, “Five Point Someone” will be made to look like a "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip in front of it. We may have captured lots of moments in the camera, but some of the best moments in life can never be captured in camera. There were the secret crushes, the not-so-secret crushes(for which I did get an earful), the Trip (that changed things forever), the jealousies, the heartbreaks, the shocking revelations, the bitter confrontations, the back stabbings, the forgivings, the redemption, the touching moments, the late night sms-es, the group studies, the college events, the seminars, the surprises, the birthday treats, the canteen gapshap, the cold shoulder treatments, the pranks, the advices, the “I’ll be there for you” moments, the triumphs, the failures, the gossips (and a lot of em!!) Whew!! And all this happened with semester exams in the corner and in between boring and dull class lectures !!

There were a dozen different people who have entered my life and have carved a special place of their own. They were a dozen different characters, with differing temperaments, there were times when they have been a shoulder to lean onto, and times when they would slap me to show me that the path Iam taking is wrong. I’ve jabbered on from dusk till dawn with some of them, I’ve even shown the darker side of mine to some of them, whereas in the company of a few I just preferred to sit back and listen to them talk, not because I had nothing to say, but because just listening to them chattering on would make me feel complete, and drown all my worries away. All of them have stuck with me inspite of what I was, I was moody at times, hard to approach, acid tongued on some days, down and out on other days, but they had always stuck beside me, always offering me a kind word or two even when I was in no mood to hear it.

Come semester exams we all would get busy getting photocopies of notes, textbooks and pieces of info from the Internet that would constitute as our “study material”, there were the occasional fights on study materials not being passed around to other members of the pack. There would be advices passed via sms on the night before the exam on what to study, and how to study, answers would be marked from question papers and diligently passed along to my friends. The most irritating part was the way answers were discussed after the exam was written, that was the time of the day where I would plug my ears and nod along to whatever was being said.  

Its all changed now, forget meeting them, even catching up with them over the phone would seem impossible. At the end of the day, the plush office, the unlimited coffees, the pay, the security that comes with having a job will never be a substitute for the completeness you get when you are in the company of friends, for getting your dreams this is the price we pay. I guess its a part of growing up, coming to terms with a changing life sucks, people change, our priorities change,and the next thing we know we will be married and will have no time for reminiscing our good ol' days, but those two years will be the best days of my life, where few guys and gals met as empty- handed individuals, and left as friends carrying something of each other - memories. This piece is a salute to my group of dirty dozen, Geek, Chatterbox, Big Brother, Paan, Beets, Vaikyam, Ratwoman, and Lady Kong, (now people pls don’t fight over the order) thanks for spreading some light and some fireworks in my life.