Monday, September 27, 2010

What is Doing the Rounds in My Head

It didn't take much planning, surprisingly, this reunion that we girls from the BCom class had yesterday. The idea started after many years of planning to "catch up" individually, something that of course didn't happen. And then, out of a casual Facebook message that spiralled out of control, a plan was born. Girls I had scarcely thought about in the last six years, except in stray conversations, began to call up. It grew so fierce, the enthusiasm, that I was fielding calls throughout the day, earning very angry looks from ma who I had taken out shopping.

And then, it all fell into place. Most were free and after six long years, a bunch of us girls met on a Sunday under the threat of a very angry grey cloud. Need I say that it was super fun? I was nearly made to take a bow for getting it together. None of us could stop laughing, most times for no reason. Girls then, women now. Working, married, with a kid, with the air of the women we have all grown up to be. Yet we giggled and the psst...psst...began. My girls. Three years, a long time ago, spent in surviving college, what we all now see as the best years of our lives. Years spent eating ice candy that cost Rs 3. Years spent in friendships, exams, naughty jokes, silly fights, chalk piece days. College. Memories.

A bigger one is up next, sometime next month. So if you were my classmate at some point in life, call, mail or text me.

On days like this, when people who love you the most in life, your parents, have just left after a long holiday, when the smell and sprinkles of rain is in the air, that thing called nostalgia hits the hardest, doesn't it? It's strange how much I have come to be re-associated with Kodagu and people from there these past few weeks. I have never been big on the past, call that a vice, if you will. I am that way, it didn't work trying to change that. I rarely sit for coffee with my memories. There is in me an inability to cry easily, again a vice, if you ask me. People from college, school used to be left back there. Is that just me? Or something that a part of a personality I did not previously have, led me to?

Why do we peek into the past? Why do we seek out people we used to know and try to rekindle some connection? Could it be the Facebook phenomenon? Why dip into the years past? I don't know. I can't answer that except to say that we do. Maybe as we grow older, there is something tugging us back, some want for a period of innocence. I don't want to think the stone on which 'Nostalgia' is carved gets heavier as we grow older. But maybe that is what it is.

There are reasons that are forming in my head, but even before they form fully, I tell them to go away. That can't be it. Could it be the roots that can never be fully uprooted? Could it be the constant, unconscious yearning for a simpler something? Why does the past always seem better than what is there now? I wish I could write forth my half baked ideas that I know are not really the answer. But they don't sound right even in my head.

In the last few days, I learnt several things about people I know. A friend is managing a plantation. Another is getting into an arranged marriage (the last person I would have expected to). Another married a college sweetheart and has a beautiful kid. Another is using technology to design for an automobile company. Another is seeing another friend. Another was supposedly murdered. Yet another eloped. Another is DJing. One is moving countries, one marrying a classmate, one a citizen abroad, another something else....that is a great deal of information to handle. I don't quite know what thought are running around my mind now.

The past forces you to look at your present in a new perspective, I suppose. Is life about walking on without looking back or is this nostalgia thoughts of an undecided mind?

2 comments:

Debanish Achom said...

I saw somewhere that the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young. They are your link from your past to your present. And it's also important to work hard to bridge the gap in location and lifestyle.

Deepa Bhasthi said...

Yeah, I remember reading that line too, about needing people you knew when you were young. Damn thing, these cliches are true...