Days

Days, these days, pass in a hurry. I remember how I reluctantly woke up early this Monday to reach college on time since I desperately needed to be where my books were. And before I could notice, it’s Friday and I am back at home. It tells me that I am more at home now, when I am in the hostel. For a major part of my first year, Mummy used to send me off to college every Monday with myriad Do’s & Don’t’s as well as with a very heavy heart, as though I was leaving for war. And truth be told, a part of that did seep into me and I, although completely aware that I was going to be back in a matter of days and in any case it’s just around forty odd kilometres away that I was going, would too feel sad about it. In retrospect, I think it was a most childish thing, and everyone ought to grow up so much so as to be willing to change shelters for education or profession. It’s remarkable how things are better now. Mummy gets up, wakes me up, I pack my big bag for hostel and my small bag for college, do the routine, have my breakfast and leave, that occasional forgetting some important file at home notwithstanding. Of course, this is only what happened even then in the initial days, but it has acquired a sense of mechanisation to it, as if all of us are programmed, like Robots are, to do what we do. For instance, I am always at that very point on the lane from where I have to turn right when Mummy comes to the balcony just in the nick of time to wave a final bah-bye to me, time after time after time; it’s incredible precision-programming in action.

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I am done with Semester Seven now, which means I have now known seven-eighths of what I needed to know to be called an engineer. On the face of it, I know nothing. All I know is how to cram before the exams, write the exams so that I get a decent enough score and just get away. Yes, that’s all I know. And yes - I also know how to destroy all evidence that I tried for it, in case I don’t actually get the decent score I aspired for!

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Had I not been deep sunk in a meaningless muddle of my own back then, I’d have loved to come up with farewell eulogies for both Jumbo and Dada. Call it fixation, but I fear that as my own heroes of Indian Cricket fade into the oblivion of the sidelines, my own love for following the game will peter out sooner than later. No Dhoni can be Dada, no Bhajji ever Jumbo; and even as we’re doing very well to rip apart the Aussies and the English one after another, I seem to miss the memories of those passionately fought draws that these men of lesser luck always seemed to end up with. Apart from that, I sense a somewhat intricate feeling of oneness with big-day chokers, being one myself. I know, I know that’s a weird justification to place their losses before these victories, but I guess there’s no harm in justifications being weird as long as they be truly-felt ones.

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I’d also have loved to write about the exams, and that’s almost a ritual for this blog – I see I have a specific Exam-post for each of the exams I have taken over the last couple of years, but then so much has been said about them already that it makes no point really. ‘All’s well that ends well’, is all I guess I can come up with.