ILU ILU

Why should most of the stuff you write be about your past, or grow upon memories or just be ramblings of prudent hindsight; why should it be a thing from history most of the times, I asked myself today. Except that I chose not to answer it. Because to answer it would have meant more deliberation of the past, more of the same thing I was trying to caution myself against.

I found an old friend on the internet a few days ago. And for a moment it was like being transported to a time of fifteen years back. When phones still meant landlines, letters had not become obsolete, and wearing jeans with ‘Baazigar’ or ‘ILU ILU’ printed on them was a rage, at least among kids my age. And when it was still okay, for me, to tell a girl I loved her, and tell my Dad back home that I loved that girl, and all that without even knowing what love meant. All that I knew, for all I recollect, was that in the films the hero invariably loves a girl, and that I should be no less than a hero! It was truly wonderful to have caught up with him. I was only six then, but I remember every detail of the times I spent around him just like I remember what I had for lunch today. In fact, when I think of my lunch today, I don't go back to smelling it. But when I think of those times, I can sense the aroma of air so peculiarly characteristic of my junior school's staff room. Perhaps, at some point in my life I will also miss the hostel mess I so hated at one time, and about which I am entirely indifferent now. But then, don't you start missing everything that was once there, just because it was once there and it isn't now; rather irrespective of whether or not you liked it when it was there ? H'm anyway I will never be sure if it brought about a similar cheer in his disposition also, but from the looks of it he seemed as happy as I had been. The regrouping didn’t intensify to live to its initial promise, and that's quite alright, really. The short gush of overflowing simplicity of days that have gone by, was more than worth-it in itself.

Simplicity, well almost! I remember there was one thing I had found particularly complex back then. It's like yesterday, when we were told to write a paragraph on 'My Mother'. What did I know, that just like mine the respective mothers of the other thirty odd students also happened to be the 'best mother in the whole world', and that too with such certainty that this was put forth in the first line of everyone's paragraph, without exception. And hey I thought I was told there could be only one 'best' ! Well, that was the first of the innumerable contradictions I was to discover in the many subsequent years of my education, and also one that remains etched in my memory more compellingly than all others because it told me contradictions needn't be untrue, in fact they could be more true than accepted truths.

Ah ! I had cautioned myself against retrospection just at the beginning of the post and as it turns out, I filled the whole of my post with it. Now I feel I typify incorrigibility, and I had better tell myself not to study, in order that I actually end up studying.