Sunday, May 2, 2010

Walkin down the memory lane


And this was something i wrote after i finished my final year exams.....


Yesterday I wrote my last ever exam and today realization dawns upon me that I have completed 15 years of……writing exams. PHEW!! What a transformation! From getting those golden stars in primary to getting 90% in Intermediate to hoping to pass in Income Tax
But above all this, there is a bigger thought eating up my head – no more bunking, no more standing outside the gate for coming late, no more fests and no more attendance issues – NO MORE COLLEGE
There is no way one will get over the fun times we had at college. Life spent at college was one big party lasting for 3 years.
Clearing the B Com (Honours) entrance was my first milestone at college (sounds fancy? Only we know how fancy it is). I was late for the first day of college – a tradition followed for the next three years. The rest of the first year was a matter of two Venu’s – entertainment in Venugopal Sir’s class and getting thrown out of Venumadhav Sir’s. Canteen Manchuria became the staple food and cricket at the end of a long day was the routine (Now wondering if those days were all that long)
Fast forward to the second year and there was fierce competition among the lecturers as to who was more irritating – shudh Hindi wali BFS or the lunch break stealing brinjal head or the ever irritating pig mouth or the yawn inducing HOD (can’t believe I let out a yawn while writing this too). Cricket was replaced by football and fun outside class was replaced by fun in FIT class (awww…I so miss her). We won Prerana but that didn’t address our attendance issues and we visited the staff room more often than we visited class.
The third year passed in the blink of an eye. More than half of the year was spent at home and the remaining half was spent in preparing a project and dressing up in formals to attend campus placements. Cricket and football was replaced by shouts of “Jai Telengana”. Exams always seemed far away and when they came, they threatened to never finish, thus making the past fifteen days longer than the whole of my fifteen years.
There was a time that I hoped that college would finish faster than it should but now I wish it lasted a few more years.

The Noughties - The Decade gone by!

I vividly remember how I started off the first decade of the second millennium…By watching Titanic on Star Movies. Although the ship hit an iceberg and sunk, my voyage continued and reached 2010.
Looking back at the decade gone by, we can say terrorism won, guns down! This decade took terrorism to a new level altogether. It all started when two metallic birds crashed into the twin towers of New York killing almost three thousand and instilled fear in the lives of millions. The attack on the Parliament, the London bomb blasts, the Mumbai attacks etc, made terrorism more seasonal than monsoons in our country. Suicide bombers killing dozens and crippling hundreds in the terror infested countries of Pakistan and Afghanistan no longer make headline news.
Along with the cold blooded human acts, we also suffered from nature’s wrath. Leaving aside the tsunami in 04, the earthquakes in Gujarat, the floods in Thailand and the forest fires in Australia, we also got to hear about a hurricane called ‘Katrina!’ It even managed to snow in Dubai!!
This decade brought people closer than ever before. Cell phones from went the phase of being a luxury product to a comfort good and then an absolute necessity. We made Google a verb and networking sites helped finding the long lost friend.
While there was faster technology, faster cars and faster humans (Usain Bolt ran 100mts in a whopping 9.58 seconds!), this recommended pace does not apply to Global Warming. If we do not go into an overdrive on underdriving etc., we will have left our carbon footprints in the sands of desertification before this decade is done and dusted!!!
This decade also saw the boomers making millions and then the fabled incomes dried down and dementors and vampires chased us as we went into two years of brutal recession. This will also be remembered as the decade where homosexuality came out of the closet, live-in relationships were no longer taboo and surrogate mothers became a reality while reality shows redefined the term ‘reality.’
In the sports arena, the Americans and the Europeans dominated the Olympics. But we will remember it as the decade where we lifted bronze in Sydney, shot silver at Athens and converted it into gold at Beijing. While we were creating so much hype and hoopla about winning a few medals, Michael Phelps swam his way to eight golds shattering every record in the book. The noughties, as the decade is being called, also witnessed Asia hosting a football World Cup for the first time, Lance Armstrong battling cancer to winning the Tour de France for seven consecutive years, Roger Federer winning fifteen Grand Slam titles and the birth of fast food like cricket!!!!
With all that, I set sail for the next phase of my voyage and as they would say in France, “Bon Voyage!”

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

College Life

Leaving school is heart breaking, to say the least, especially when we can’t be sure where life will take us after all. You can’t easily get over the fun times you had in school…. scribbling on the desks, stealing water bottles and sticking by each other through the most notorious pranks and punishments - life can never be the same again, I almost concluded.

And I was right, but I never knew that there was something better in store when I joined college. Whether it was bunking boring lectures (that’s almost every lecture), sneaking late into the class and mumbling away some unreasonable excuses for not attending the lectures – college life too is oodles of fun, but of a whole new kind!!!

Whether its getting ragged (something which I escaped) or ragging the stupefied freshers (includes lecturers at times) – college always has something exciting in store for you.

Hanging out with a whole lot of weird people, laughing at a bunch of weirder people and getting laughed at by the weirdest lot, when we should be attending our lectures like “good children” are some of the things that make a typical day in college.

Some things though remain the same – pulling each other’s legs or trying to suppress your laughter over a silly PJ in class….

In college the party never ends… hanging out at Mcd’s or Vacs or having a tough time trying to swallow that panipuri outside college when we should be finishing our homework like in school is like an everyday affair.

Going out for unplanned movies and fighting for that first bencher’s completed notes a week before the exams form an integral part of college life….

In short…. “College Life ROCKS!!!”