And I Shall Miss....

With less than 2 weeks left for my 2 year B-school journey to end , I wondered how much will I miss these days – and If I will , at all ? How much ever I would like to believe otherwise – I know , I will. There is always something - about everyone, everything and every phase– that is worth cherishing. My two years were no exception to this.

As the DJ played the cliché “yaaron” and “summer of 69” towards the end of our farewell bash, we couldn’t help but become a bit “senti”. As we walked back to our hostel rooms on this chilly winter night ,I was caught between the past and the future . But let the future rest for a while , I will use this space to scribble some moments of the past ….those which I will miss the most..

Ø I Will Miss my friends – who knocked on my door at odd hours , wore their dirty chappals and walked around in my recently cleaned room , borrowed stuff and conviniently forgot about it, also never expected getting their possessions back from me . I will miss those night-long “addas” in our hostel rooms , where hours flew away with the aid of maggi spiced up with “short stories of x, y and z”. The expert opinion of everyone on everything, the hours spent on analysis of the past and plans of the future .

Ø Will miss..Waking up at 12 noon , bunking classes….knowing that a friend is giving proxies .Wiling the time away , mastering the art of doing “Absolutely NOTHING”.

Ø The immense utility derived out of that first paani puri or the first bite of a mayo-filled Mc burger after weeks of “mess(y)”soda rice and mirchi rasam.....sigh!

Ø I will Miss “acting like an MBA”, competing for our GPAs -- saturating every statement (intentionally or otherwise) with our favorite jargons – ROI, competency gaps , Maslow’s , locus of controls , TQM ..and blah blah .. will miss cooking a common recipe to every problem and every case , writing exam papers as easily as writing a blog and still managing a respectable CGPA.( also writing every damn thing in bulleted points like this :P )

Ø Making presentations with the most incompatible group members on a night before, arguing and cursing them- smartly and selfishly avoiding those slides which wouldn’t fetch marks -but still being a “team” rather than a group the next morning.

Ø I will Miss my companion, my virus-ridden laptop and the junk within, where to create that “extra space” for a new movie – we deleted projects crafted by our blood sweat and tears in the last semester.

Ø I will Miss my Nirvana @ 6. To silently view the sunset from the terrace of my high-rise hostel is something to die for- to witness the world change its shade from a serene blue to a feral saffron to a melancholic purple…and finally to the gorgeous black studded with silver stars.

To put it simply - I will miss- “belonging” somewhere ,where I found many things worth missing. Its a new end ...its a new beginning.

Peep Into The Closet

A lazy afternoon, my Monday started at 12 :D. I decided to clean up my closet, since there was nothing better to do- well that’s not entirely true (with hundreds of assignments and their deadlines impending ), but to stay away from books this was a pretty good excuse.

I am a neat freak , but this only remains a reality till one gets to peep into my closet , as I dump all the mess from my room inside it . This creates an illusion of orderliness in my immediate surroundings: P

I opened a drawer-----long forgotten pieces of receipts ,tattered greeting cards in all colours possible , photographs which I took in the old old times when digital tech. was still far away and in which I stood wearing the then “HS” and now “LS” fashion , junk jewellery and the oversized hoops – now corroded and entangled , just like everything else around , the numerous studs, the anklets , the stick-on tattoos with incomprehensible designs – which were very central to the then incomprehensible phase of my life .

Right at the corner , a bundle of paper was resting - almost yellowish now , a red threadbare rubber band tied around it . It was my collection of letters, and my collection of memories .In Life, I have been lucky to meet a lot of people ,and to make a lot of friends out of those and also to collect a lot of goodbyes. This bundle was a memoir of those people and those goodbyes.

I sat on the floor ,with the floor now as messy as my closet, and I read each one of them. There were “ Why I will miss you ?” notes from my Mgt. Trainee batch of the previous organization – (this was an exercise done to improve our teamwork and people quotient during our training , but it def. had much more significance ….so much of it that after 3 years I still preserved it and cherished each word ). We were a closely knit gang , spent 25 hours of a day together :D
I read each word, remembered each one of my friend and each moment of the most wonderful 2 months of my life.
I smiled and I laughed , I remembered and I missed , and I enjoyed myself on this lazy afternoon in my hostel room . It took me sometime to decipher few signatures on those notes, of those whom I am no longer in touch with - those who were buddies before and now are just another name on my “orkut” list .

Then there were other letters, some even from my school days – "the corny ones", the "I am sorry ones" , "the confessional ones" , the overtly "sentimental and/or hilarious" ones , the ones which were “important” for survival in our teenage, and the ones which were the lifeline of our gossip sessions all night long . I spent an hour going through them – and it was an hour spent well , there was indeed nothing better to do than this , today on this lazy Monday afternoon.

Of Life , In Life

The most noble truth amongst the 4 , which Buddhism preaches is that 'attachment is the root cause of all suffering' .I can’t decide whether to appreciate the simplicity , or the complexity of this statement. It took me a few years , number of books, a small amount of research, some “enlightened” people and hands-on exposure (ouch ! ) to realize that why everyone from parmhansa to osho invented the same recipe to moksha.Recently, I witnessed something that made me think of a slightly different version of this noble truth .

Waiting for my friend on the station, I was busy preparing a mental list of what to shop , where to shop and plunder as much as possible with my limited resources. An unkempt malnourished middle aged man, stinking of a mixture of sweat and ammonia in oversized clothes came and sat right next to me. My reflex - a disgusted look and an intentionally rude, audible “tch ” , before I occupied another bench nearby. I later noticed that he was a blind fellow and the guilt pinched me hard.

He was holding a yellow/ now black bag close to himself with his two arms wrapped around it – staring into the darkness, closely watching the void with his fictional eyes. He then lit up a beedi , holding it between his third and fourth fingers , thick end inwards , followed by deep drags . He seemed to be in bottomless thoughts, his head tilted in an angle as if sensing everything around him.

He took a half-torn piece of paper, and scribbled something on it, or attempted to do so. To check whether the pen worked - he held the paper close to his nose and smelt the paper, then the tip of the pen- one by one for 20 odd pens and bundled them together .They were cheap plastic pens – fluorescent green and shocking pink – which u and me will never buy.

The train approached, he headed towards it making his way through the crowd. Each individual in isolation would have been keen to the poor guy, but when the same individuals make the crowd – cruelty creeps in. He was pushed and yelled at, was given those contemptuous looks when he brushed against anyone- the same treatment which I gave him moments ago .

He managed to board the train and tried to earn his evening bread through those cheap 20 pens, which he made sure worked, but about which no one really cared. His feeble life, a hopeless one …
I wondered why the effort to cling on to such a fragile life after all? “To attain moksha give up attachment with happiness.” ----In this case where was happiness in first place to be attached to?
Each noble truth has an answer in spirituality, but there needs to be one more truth and one more answer.
Why In spite of utmost suffering, there is utmost attachment? Or is it because of utmost suffering, there is utmost attachment? .I wish there was a recipe to overcome just this only inconvenient truth – of life, in life!