Of Withering Friendships and Unsaid Truths

A Beautiful Memory: Learning, Belonging and Other Musings

High School Reminiscences, part 2 of 16

For any teenager, it might be difficult to say something confirmed with finality. Although the word friendship can be a straight-cut misnomer when you’re nothing more than a teen and inexperienced to appreciate its power, there are exceptions, meaning you just have to find the right person to be friends with. And finding the right person is where most of us, at least me, go wrong. 

True friendship lasts long for a lifetime. We hear that a lot, but where is true friendship? Does it even exist? That was one loaded question I continued to ask myself during the two years that I have studied in a far-away high school, up north neighbouring the Air Force Base. 

Sure, true friendship doesn't exist in a form or it is present at someplace where you go and treat yourself with. True friendship is an experience, a magical feeling of intimacy; it’s like missing someone you thought you are familiar with but want to be friends, and so much more... However, based upon my personal experience, here is an anecdote I’d like to share. 

Unaccustomed and unfamiliar 

The point is that some of my classmates, the Arrogant Lot, were made of sterner stuff. No doubt about that. A rare breed of characters that you won’t come across anywhere. But sooner than later, I thought, it might run the risk of becoming extinct! In my teenage mind, I deduced that it was a clear case of Pride needling Humility out of the equation: it’s like pushing off ‘future competition’ and ‘potential challenges’ if there are any off the map. Friendship, in such somewhat reproachful circumstances, don’t get a chance to fructify, and considering the situation, I found myself in, perhaps it really shouldn't. 

Strutting or asserting their ‘strengths’ they thought were far superior to any challenger’s, past or present, was their favourite game plan to ward off the fresh individuality of new students who are bound to bring to the batch. However, given the fact that the Arrogant Lot’s conventional I.Q. levels, though on an upward scale, most of them had a somewhat poor understanding of their classmates’ abilities to get good marks or make an overall good impression. At one moment these bunch of so-called ‘perennial performers’ doesn’t mind putting you up on a high pedestal, at others, they overthrow you at once when you don’t get good marks, and they talk to you when talked to until the time when you get good marks or get appreciation certificates from teachers. But the latter was not so easy to come by. 

In our school, teachers only appreciated when there’s something ‘exemplary’ to be pleased about, otherwise, they simply refrained from doing so. That is to say, I was not used to seeing such peculiar ‘stuff-strutting’ types of students going about their wily ways without restraint and frankly, it is one of the reasons why my sense of moral justification to comprehend theirs went south. 

I was far too withdrawn from such a display of excessive behaviour I didn't approve of. Calm and collected among the lot, I just couldn't grant them (most of them) their detached way of cleverness and cunning aptitude while we attended classes sitting on long unskilfully made wooden benches and gawping at the blackboard straight ahead. Honestly, all their superior airs about their studies bordering on egotism and overconfidence issues troubled me so much that I thought it was too much for me to relate to this kind of unfamiliar behaviour, so I better learn my lessons my way. Our teachers were, understandably, duty-bound to give a grounding in the subjects and so wrapping up lessons within the stipulated time was high up on their teaching agendas.

Furthermore, to gel with the Arrogant Lot, in the class, was quite a task at hand and I dropped it like hot coals. I thought I would have been better off if it hadn't been such a case at all at the school, considering I too was one of the new students amidst them. I must also make mention that sometimes I did enjoy their company not that I didn't but at other times I loathed it too. Therefore, I pinned it all down to two words: professional hazard. Though things in the class were not too difficult to get on with ultimately, however, I did end up seeing some very tough days in their uneasy company during those two years of my student life. It’s destiny, I suppose. 

[In fact, students from the Junior class were far more interesting to befriend as they were out-going than most of us Seniors could only dream of. I often think of Rushma Florence, Mitu Singh, Topal Chapathi, Thomas (Doubting Thomas?), and a couple of other cool, smart and friendly personalities. Unmissable were their twinkle in their eyes, awing mannerisms, ever-ready highly infectious smile that spreads rapidly warming up the cockles of your heart, fun-loving personas. Traits like these, of a long-gone era, I suppose, are a rarity these days. Sure, there are exceptions though]. 

Afterwards, I just stopped judging my classmates based upon what they did or did not do ‘normally’ because it wasn’t my business anymore. I was in the throes of judging people based upon their behaviour I would see every day at school, but no, I was not on the right track. So better sense prevailed. I reorganized my thoughts and left them to their own devices. I understood good friendship doesn’t have a form or something, it has to be slowly often longingly desired. Hitting out at the first instance itself happens… in escapist cinemas, perhaps not in real life. 

Soon after, it turned out to be fun thinking that they were just minor school students who ended up with a proud arrogance showing-off their kind of still-so-inadequate school-level hits and misses in terms of their studies and I cannot see myself as holier-than-thou. In spite of that private adjustment I made with my new circumstances, I was still asking myself stupid questions, I admit, didn’t matter to me: Why so? What exactly? Just to flaunt? To flaunt what? Why do you guys believe so much in your game of one-upmanship? Just be cool, no? Are you trying to impress our teachers? Why resort to such a thing at all? They were already so impressed with us senior bunch, weren’t they? 

Still no friendship, hardly anything 

Our teachers were good at teaching. They taught well. Full marks to them. We, Seniors, knew that our collective performance was supposed to reflect on their good teaching skills and it supposedly did. During those days, back in the late 1980s, thinking of such banal questions (see above) used to make me smart from some kind of teenage anguish, atrocious one, that I had no clue how to banish it or shrug it off and go about my business of being a careful, reflective school student. Such was my teen life; it’s was more or less a matter of one’s learning experience. 

Unfortunately, what these proud bunch of my fellow bum chums didn’t know about was that almost all of us had a good surprise up our sleeves in regards to making a career: if that is the ultimate goal for everyone studying at a school or college. Anyone who is even moderately interested to perceive and understand as well this basic reality, he/she should appreciate the duty of being – a good human being first. The onus lies with the individual. While all of us were good men and women, boys and girls or teenagers actually, but the level of ‘career mongering’ that went about in our class wasn’t exactly ideal behaviour, and personally speaking, I’ve always looked down upon their quirky behaviour. Career mongering down down! Yea, that’s more like it. 

Having said that, discussing one’s career aspirations is quite all right but only if it is coolly spoken, and not bombastically about; it’s not about throwing angry barbs at others who might not have a career plan or two yet. In all honesty, I have always refrained from hollering about my career aspirations with the fellow students of my class. Why? Because it was not required at all. Better still, it was not my thing to do so. Those who wanted to outclass each other and feel worthier in the process, do it: be my guest. But why shout out loud? Couldn’t it be articulated nicely? Have career aspirations for all you like, but be a gentleman first and gently express yourself. I know I know no two fingers are alike. Sigh! 

I can be a great chum and even speak candidly about my career aspirations with much enthusiasm but shouting from the rooftops has never been my flair, besides it’s unbecoming of one’s standing in front of all present looking at you as if expecting you to gab about it with gay abandon. I wanted to keep that aspect of my student life strictly under wraps, not giving anything away was my idea of saying: “Well, I’ll see when it comes”. Nevertheless, I just knew there will be something so why worry and yak about it endlessly and cause unnecessary dilemmas for others who couldn’t be so keen to have it discussed upfront. For those who don’t incline to be an engineer or a doctor, there would be other professions surely where one can make a mark and be happy. Wasn’t school or college education just a means towards that end? By the time this positivity came into full view in my mind, we already had left school to go our separate ways, with every one of us seeking his place under the sun: a sustainable career that is – Astronaut or… naught! 

Metaphorically speaking, just follow your heart (and mind) and your inner compass in life, you’ll have no harm done unto yourself. Try it. It works the way you want. All other hollow jingoism will fall by the wayside. ‘Follow your heart (and mind)’ and ‘your inner compass’ should be the essential premise by which one should, in general, live by. But I still had no proper friendship at school. 

Who cares about friendship? Friendship gayee tel lene 

Is teenage friendship overrated? What got my goat was the fact that all that they, the Arrogant Lot, ever wanted was to go overseas before appearing in one engineering entrance examination after another – all in the fond hope of prospering monetarily first, I suppose! While there’s nothing wrong with going abroad but my beef was with the continuous show-off exercise that they could very much afford to get done what others could only dream about, and that sort of thing. 

Eventually, peer pressure loomed large over me to set myself in the direction the majority herd went. So I too began pursuing what I call ‘conventional dreams’ and was forced to prepare to take the plunge that will not only keep the society motor-mouths something to tattle about but also meet the expectations of my fantastic relatives (read: let’s see if you can do it like them) and people who I call friends. Wow! How typically considerate of me to have fallen in line just like that! See? I am so sweet! 

While I was looking for friendship with them, they were looking for careers to be made, fast. Friendship gayee tel lene. (Who cares about friendship?) Sorry to say, with most of the classmates it was an onslaught on the very idea of friendship, bonding, and bonhomie – and can you believe that all these wonderful things of life never made their presence felt amongst us school-goers? Friendship, companionship, or relationship never bloomed in our hearts, for career mongering was in the firm grip of their heads, poor lads. As far as making friends was concerned, those two formative years of our life were gone for a toss. 

Alas, for them there was absolutely no time for friendship, only studies, as much as it can be accommodated, were paramount on their heads. Friendship fell by the wayside as a flower trampled beneath the weight of their furious career-making plans and never-ending studies. What bloomed was narrow walls of cold antipathy towards each other, nothing else. After school, we never crossed our paths again. And they say, it’s just another day in paradise! How can that ever be possible? 

One final compliment! 

We were aspiring kiddos, not pompous clowns. Surprisingly, the girls of our class were more sensible, easy-going, and appreciably realistic than we boisterous boys could manage to be. What a smug feeling of proving one’s false superiority over classmates, my God! Most unimpressive. Boys will be boys, I guess, and girls will be girls being the best looking of the human species. 

When you’re up and about building a show-off career for yourself and are successful at it, hypocritical actions follow suit. You tread on this path without hindrance or anyone stopping short of educating you that the foundation on which you formed your show-off career has to be misguided means towards realizing your career objectives. Despite that, it is best left to the individual’s choice to go on that well-trodden path while consigning all bonds of friendship to the flames. In any case, who am I or anyone, teachers included, to tell this bunch of smarty-pants that; no one, apparently; not even a friend. Some things never change and some other things change beyond repair or renewal. Hard fact of life. It’s better to do what others before you have done and survived, so abjure friendship embrace profit-making career. Friendship doesn’t bring laurels, a good career does. So go ahead turn your back on it, feign ignorance. Reject friendship to fetch the kind of laurels you are so desperately desirous of. In such circumstances, one can only voice an opinion: Pity that you guys haven’t deserved friendship in the first place. 

In love with my regular khadi life 

In matters of living and longing what better way than to stick to my part of regular yet monotonous, repetitious khadi life. I ought to do my job I am destined to do – that is, work for long unearthly hours – without having to worry about whether I’ll be paid (in cash or kind or credit) or not for all the pains I was fool enough to take. 

Why, didn’t you hear: “Vats, karm kar karm, phal ki chinta mat kar”. And curse me all you like for not forgetting to bear that motto in mind to photo-finish unlike some of the jingoistic clowns of my class. Didn’t you ever hear that gentlemanly guys are supposed to finish last (out of concern for other desperately rotee surats!) if they have to, and never commit the mistake to come “first, first-class first” because that’s pitiful… gross for them? So I gladly obliged them. Now get that smirk off your face. I came first in class forever after, and I am as equally successful just as any other guy from my class has been or would ever want to be. 

So where’s the difference, fellas? There’s isn’t any such thing. It’s a matter of one’s perspective; depends on how you look at it from what angle. Beware, a bad-angle look will often bring a smirk to your face. All I am saying is: “First, first-class first” isn’t any good student’s private property that gives him the moral license to set himself high up on a kicking horse and destroy friendship and memories with everyone forever. Just think about it, my dear never-friends. Be first-class first by all means but it doesn’t give you the right to be indifferent to others who will come first in class whenever that happens. The real fun is in the quest, the journey itself, to achieve good results, not in being arrogant and haughty when you happen to get some good marks: and there is no grace in the latter. Sell your so-called high horse BS of ‘first, first-class first’ off, you might get a little something at a local Kabaadiwala! 

Fine. Go right ahead. Nothing wrong with sitting in such exams, is there? But we should remember that a day will come when everybody will have to take a long walk down old Memory Lane for introspection and reflection over memories of past happenings, and there, when you’re put in touch with the deepest part of yourself you’ll realize, finally, that how wonderful some things could have been if you had made friends with someone; but you didn’t. Sadly, all have been lost forever. Never to come back. 

And you guys thought your act of strutting your ‘stuff’ of ‘good marks’ and all that ‘first-class first’ brouhaha – with a little prancing and a dash of ‘index finger-pointing’ thrown in – can make others behold of you as some kind of “deadly” species that ever walked on Earth (while also basking in false pride). To the so-called underachieving counterparts who you, perhaps, didn’t realize were always blissfully uninterested and unconcerned with the display of your narcissistic behaviour in the class and your “looking deadly” snooty rubbish. Oh, come on guys give yourselves a break! Have a heart. 

So here’s hoping that you “deadly” people read well and pass out to get a decadent engineering seat in some underfunded, overcrowded faux university/college at the most. But please just be true to your conscience and your identity at least in matters of friendship. Getting to be an engineer is not the end in itself. Being a good human being is. Otherwise, it’s nothing but ridiculing yourself to be a man with no humanity and zero consciences. And that’s dangerous. Yes, you heard me right. 

Cats have nine lives, we don’t. Lucky cats! We, humans, live only once, remember; maybe twice, if you are lucky like James Bond as you might prefer to ‘die another day’ or simply have ‘no time to die’! Just know that this world is a big place for everyone to live and prosper, and yes, come what may just be happy. Happiness is equivalent to all the “good marks” you can get anywhere, anyplace, anytime. Think about it: Happiness is friendship. If you’re not happy, you’re nothing. If you’re unhappy, you probably are risking yourself to come back to square one. 

When you have a ‘light bulb’ illuminating somewhere within you, know that you have a new idea you never had before to change your life with. A wise guy said: It’s never too late to start anew. Take care and goodbye. 

By Arindam Moulick

Disclaimer: This blog is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Tale of Teenage Angst

A Beautiful Memory: Learning, Belonging and Other Musings

High School Reminiscences, part 1 of 16

Long years ago, amidst the frenzied coterie of my classmates and their dream of making it big hovering around their heads like…Killer Bees, I was finding myself trying to firm up my resolve involving my life’s upcoming career battles, post-school.

I had to first learn to become conscious of how to be painstakingly hard-working (painstakingly was the operative word) to secure something of value in life, and simultaneously be able to live through (if I have to) the inevitability of long jostling sessions of indecisiveness, dithering, and hesitancy lessons, no matter if an unlikely Stroke of Luck decides to work in my favour or not. 

After a little bout of flashback of the blues and spells of gloomy nostalgia had run its course, my humble dreams readily took the cue to begin scaling upwards, little by little (somewhere between a snail and a rabbit thing), the leaning ladder of success I'll make sure to climb. A little bit of professional joy and attainment shave also managed to fill up my Grecian Urn with happiness and contentment. Failures were relegated to being stepping stones as soon as that elusive success thing was in my reach. For inculcating such positivity in my heart, I express my gratitude in deference to the eternal One smiling (or frowning) at us from above.

Were they friends? I have my doubts

First up, I think I’ve been a bit lucky to get freed from the few traces of introversion and taciturnity post senior secondary school years. Of course, it didn’t just happen one fine day and I was all-smiles in its wake, happy to shed old stuff off and move on to a brighter tomorrow. Yes, things don’t work that easily, never do. 

Like everybody else, I too had to work at it, mainly concentrating on the plumbing, carpentry, technical and mechanical that make all the necessary difference, all the way till thy kingdom come. Surely, good things take their own sweet time to come round until realization hits home the point that it hadn’t exactly worked the way you wanted. There’s something amiss that’s pretty hard to put a finger on. So what you do is to double back to the drawing board and start all over again, most often from scratch. I say only what I sincerely feel.

Although during those two years and after, it took me an inordinate amount of time to shake off those neurotic worries and heart-clogging tension and shrug off the let-downs, setbacks, and some imaginary drawbacks to finally get a move on. Heck, I was in college, still a teen. But thanks to my undergraduate college years, especially the first golden year, which have collectively allowed me to have new friends (and yes real and abiding friendship unlike what it was in school) and a different kind of leisurely learning experience that changed my life. The school was restricting but college made me free, I can with all my heart vouch for that.

Suffice to say that it was nothing less than providential escape that drew me out of my cocoon enforcing a feeling of a palpable sense of freedom, time, place, space, and opportunity. All these things hadn’t quite existed before and I wasn’t so much as privy to these fine things of life up until my time in college, which was one of the golden moments of my time. Maybe, it had been my fault entirely. If something goes wrong, then it’s better to blame oneself than put the blame on others. That way one can remain close to the problem and therefore the instinct to solve it.

Nonetheless, I could make out as much that it takes time for good things to come; sometimes inordinately late, sometimes fairly quickly they come. After all, they didn’t say for no reason that PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE. Of course, as a patient teenager, one should keep worrying a little, have one’s share of tension, pressure, and anxiety handled in the best way one can before reprieve comes as a breath of fresh air. However, there was no time left after passing out from school as I found myself heading into a college education that fortunately lacked no sensitivity and warmth for me to relate to with all my heart deep in its reverence. It was this sense of FREEDOM, lots and lots of it that paved the path on which I trod confidently and self-assuredly. And man was I glad about that!

Truthfully speaking, after passing out of my senior high I suspected that there was a certain sort of low-point lurking somewhere, or was it just an imaginary sense of deferment that could have been fairly common with some of us school-going students then. I can’t speak for others, but for me, the feeling of a low-point was fairly intensifying. Besides, I did have time at my express disposal to make sure that the ill-feeling is quelled. I took this momentary treat into my heart and I rejoiced in it knowing full well that I wouldn’t probably get this surplus time and opportunity to regale my life with it. While Freedom stood by me, I put my new-found energies into learning my college lessons well. I wrote the year-end exams and did science practicals and made friends with my fellow college mates. Devoid of any tension and ennui, I was living in a fairyland. College years were one of the best times of my life.

Still, there was something amiss after leaving school that I felt needed my singular attention. Friendship at school, as negligible as it was, didn’t last long. And the only good one I thought showed a little promise didn’t weather the intense opposition and so it too went the way any fledgling friendship would. The other one was of course what to do after leaving school: engineering or medicine or open a local sweet shop just around the corner and be happy. Oh, dear!

Moaning, Bemoaning Ad Nauseam

Given the task at hand, it was tough to undermine such a pesky feeling and move on as if things I thought could go wary will stop being so anymore. Rather I was thinking: all that one needs to do is holler out loud: Heck, just buzz off! And the problem just buzzes off? Takes its last breath and dies, vanishes? No way. Shouting at the problem will not make it go away and the world, as we know it, doesn’t like to be screamed at even if you are crying your heart out in despair. No agony aunt can help you if you don’t know how to be yourself and understand your limitations. Take life as it is and enjoy it as it comes. My philosophy has always been that. People couldn’t be bothered about your problems, except just yourself. They have their problems so why worry them with yours. Problem-solving is more complicated than I thought it was. Life is…a problem; deal with it. Welcome to the world of problems after problems after problems!

Gradually, I understood that the desire to do something about the difficult issues was enough to keep me on the right side of things, and why should it be so? Because being patient helped. Positivity is the key to tackle your challenges. Though courage was in short supply to look at the problem in the eye, I found myself levitating towards resolving the nagging issue of what to do after school. I said to myself: “Heck, I need to settle this before it unsettles me.” If not engineering, then what? Never been one of those who take the bull by the horns, tsk tsk not my logic, instead, I took the horns by the bull and got myself allowed into a science college with subjects of my choice. May you kindly abstain from asking as to how does one takes the horns by the bull. Well, it’s just a one-off thing and it is privileged information I can’t help but keep it hush-hush. Software engineering came a bit later.

Luckily, I had the instinct to think it through. One of the things that needed attention is how to take some practical steps so that I can go on unhindered as far as I possibly could manage in the great journey of life, earning educational degrees included. If mankind is blessed with 100 years of life (I think Gods were a little too generous to grant that kind of thing), then I could no longer just ‘sip, swirl and savour in leisure’ the wine of physical and emotional intelligence that keeps us up to speed and sustain us. I had to gulp it down all at once at least during the initial years of survival based on sound college education and all good things connected with it.

If I had turned turtle or rumoured to be out of the league of the extraordinary gentlemen, I wouldn’t have lived to tell a tale much longer than it was conceived to be. (Just joking, in case you didn’t get the hint).

Time was of the essence. In this unforgiving world, no critical hosannas or general feelings of worthiness abound that could be expected to see me through in the coming battles of adult life for a teenager like me. Maturity and aging come at a price, and Life offers no guarantee; no short-term, no long-term, that it’ll be fair with you. Men, women, and even children all have to wage constant pushing and shoving to survive with dignity and self-respect. Children need most special care, goes without saying. Often, Life will not be fair to you and yet you’ll have to live it the best you can. 

What I needed to figure out first is to find a way to root out from its supposedly deep sting its old smugness, unpreparedness, and anxiety, and throw them away like useless antiquated tatter. The question was how to prepare to live a life that must, by all accounts, feel better and even sound better; the one that creates its foothold under the sun. Come Engineering or Medicine or Sweet Shop, I am going to be upright in my approach to ultimately secure something of value. That was the deal and it still is as far as I am concerned. Take it or scupper away.

Afterwards, hard realizations had begun hitting me hard like a hammer. I figured that dealing with one’s own life in the ever-changing world wasn’t going to be an easy-going affair. To a traipsing youngster like me, it was mighty hard to believe that life could be so tough living, in a world that is fast losing its patience and sense of fun. With no means of graduate and post-graduate degrees and a job afterwards, Life itself will laugh at you. That too I’d figured. It is distressing to be grateful for the way the world works and these days nothing ever pleases me, except old friendships and memories that have survived and some others that, thanks to my good karma, came back in the reckoning.

As things went by, I began offering myself up to the hammer-hits of realizations because I thought it will harden me up a bit, put out my distress, and possibly even enable me to release all sorts of negative energies that may have been there such as pressure, stress, and unrealistic expectations. To this effect, I should be able to toss them out the window – all with a fond hope that it will make enough room for a new kind of inspiration and illumined existence instead. And therefore such an undertaking should work in my favour, and why shouldn’t it. That too was part of my plan.

By god’s grace…

Come rain or shine, I only lay claim to what I think should belong to me. My things, mine alone to love and adore. Sounds like providence taking effect? You don’t say! Moreover, it was God’s grace that wove around me like a life-jacket to stay afloat in the cacophonous sea of possibilities and probabilities that Life could throw at you. But I have no idea how far inland has I come questing for a patch of enjoyable life.

If you care to sneak a look further down into my soul, you’ll know that it’s God’s merciful charity too that had worked its way through this askance-looking teenager’s destiny/ fate/ kismet. God took pity on me in expediting my steps towards finding my roots in this increasingly drier, hotter, and angrier world of, as it seems to me, a pathetic human existence.

However, His benevolent change of heart was a one-time allowance that I partook to buckle up and enjoy the ride of my life. 

By Arindam Moulick

Disclaimer: This blog is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

When It Comes to Engineering Degree, Only Fools Rush In

While these school chums, the Arrogant Lot ones that are, were boiling over the saucepan of their colourful ambitions and dreams (I have been writing about the ‘dream theme’ in my previous blogs published here), I gladly saw myself out of their small group - all in the quest to find true happiness, friendship, meaning, and self-discovery like that great Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara had done on a military motorcycle, except that I didn’t feel the need of such a bulky mobile contraption to go along the path of self-styled self-discovery or in the pursuit of happiness business, which, I admit, I couldn’t possibly have found anywhere but right here in my own country of origin, that is Bharat, Hindustan, India.

For that reason, and for that reason alone, I had declined all offers of overseas employment, with not a hint of anger or regret or destitute feelings passing my lips.

I thought if I could try and get serendipitously lucky, just a wee bit, nothing fancy, with one or two out of my own stack of dreams getting fulfilled with a slight nod from God and oodles of parental affirmation (and this is very important for me), then my life would achieve its main purpose: that is to be – above all worldly, man-made things – happy, nostalgic, and thereabouts: To live in the moment, think about the past, and not having to do anything with the future – nothing more but also nothing less. That said, yes, I am still happy with my serendipitous pond life!

Heaven Knows

Heaven knows, all that I ever desired was the familiar, comfortable environs of my kingly bedroom (preferably in a bourgeois apartment building with running tap water and electricity or in an own house with an easy-to-care garden of Eden out front and a forest-like one at the back! Ah!) with the old Orient fan circling, sometimes whirling, sometimes twinkling (it feels like it twinkles a bit) to the overhead ceiling of my room and my private nook to goad me to copiously read books and generally exist as a purposeless dandy while I never will have to get unduly anxious or lose my languorous sleep in the nearly blazing hot summer afternoons or cold wintry months of the year about those guys, the arrogant ambitious lot, “ENJOYING” in America or Europe or Dubai wherever their fashionable dreams took them by their ears or bled them through their noses!

Being half asleep…half-awake…half-naked and sheepishly thinking about those gung-ho boisterous folks who have perennially imprisoned themselves to get deliberately weird unknown prefixes in front of their honest, innocent names that their parents gave them; the kind of insomniac fame that removes these glory seekers forever from the feeling of the everyday aspects of happiness and familial piety back in their homelands, and not to mention of the copious wads of alien money – “dollar income” – that most often than not refutes fair thought processes in these “you-can’t-touch-me-I-am-up-there” individuals’, I’d say, under-developed mindsets or some kind of naturally occurring impediment of moralistic fallacy, whatever that might be. Having that said, I now run the risk of being called a bitter person who keeps fiddling around with clear and present realities of the current era! Is that all there is to it? Nope! Not really. Never been. Trust me, I am not one such person; it’s not my fault if I do have some personal thoughts about such, I admit, a complex subject, and yet I have to write about it in my blog. Let me have that comforting freedom to make a few points, without hurting anyone. Maybe, I love my homeland a little too much than required and that’s something to do with whatever I have been surmising up till now and writing about it here.

Coming back to the point I was trying to make: Obviously then that these folks cannot be expected to be in full control over the way their life has been panning out in front of them, and are, therefore, never really in touch with their humble past anymore. That’s just one of the several reasons why my life is so very different than most of these glory-seekers of the globalized world. All this is nothing but miasmic effluvia (to put in gently) if you ask me. It isn’t something to get my head around it that this filthy rich man of Love, Literature, and Home can hardly give any credit for. Whatever.

Luxury feelings of their fancy dreams never made it to my heart to swell with pride; this vainglorious ambition thing, this adage that human life has to be of some monetary value almost always disappoints me or gets my goat, in a manner of speaking. As far as I can manage to think about it I’d say for me the word ‘value’ is a matter of great inconvenience and immense trouble that one has to put up with. Given the world’s vicious (not vicious, then what?) political and chaotic economic atmosphere, I’d say it’s enough to live your life responsibly, with as much dignity as you can manage; wanting to derive ‘value’ should sound as of no use. Agreeably, it is a matter of self-perception too, and therefore if one thinks in this vein that one’s life has to have some ‘value,’ go ahead have it the way you want; otherwise, I don’t think it really does matter. Being born as humans is just enough to wriggle in the mud of that so-called ‘value’ you are talking about.

Yet I understand that it’s fair enough for their part to foster a life of their own and live as they please in a globalized world. Forgive them, O God, for they know not what they do.

While their way of life is not something I’d undermine as merely floccinaucinihilipilification, but I’m happy to categorically state that I, in spite of being a man myself, seek no man-made name or fame or ‘value’ money, whatsoever. Everyone is welcome to his/her own sense of entitlement. As for me, I wanted to live my life a little differently from most others can coherently think of in a world which is viciously decisive about haves and have-nots, and I am glad to state that I did… but… I am equally sad and not very cheery to reveal that I did after all fell prey to the kind of life I had always been turning my nose up at Software Engineering is the culprit; it did me in. Want to talk to someone deriving some ‘human value’ after all that he said above? Come to papa!!!

I am guilty as charged as far as the programming and coding world of software engineering is concerned. Believe me, life did flash before my eyes on the way to undertaking what others would call the tables have sure turned on me, and how!

Destiny: 1, Me: 0 (a big one!)

Yeah, I did end up being of all things a digital miracle worker (a software engineer, what else?), so much for my stiff upper lip attitude towards being one of the sodding clichéd IT Engineers of this doomsday world. Oh! What a spooky world we live in; I can’t believe I had ended up doing what I had never dreamt I would do! Life, it seems, had pulled a fast one on me, I think, on purpose.

Talk about Destiny has its own quirky whim to pull a fast one on happy-go-lucky individuals like me; this is one such ill-fated occurrence that I’ll have to live by it. It beat me in the game of choosing to be what I wanted to be. Software engineering was up for grabs and getting to it was fairly easy for me, not hard, going forward. Consequent to such a surprising thing happening to me, I’ve ended up with too many funny defeatist zeros and ones, digital bytes, big ones, Big Data, AI, Data Analytics, in my life’s professional kitty – up to the tip of my nose. The score: Destiny: 1 and counting; me: 0 and subtracting! No wonder, life is a tough taskmaster of repute. Sometimes you can’t do what you want to do, but end up doing what you didn’t want to do in the first place. For me, software stuff was one such thing that I ended up doing.

Thinking back, it wasn’t as if I was not aware of what people around me were up and about; most of them blindly and unmindfully taking up the traditional cudgels of career-making and indulging in unabashed career-mongering that according to their mindset will definitely result in either Engineering or Medicine career choice. No other career choice seemed to have existed for them. Other career choices were blissfully ignored or never talked about as if there’s no world beyond those two strict parental advisories that were handed down to them like some ancient family jewels meant to be taken care of at all costs. This is where my misery lies.

Rarely if ever these days anybody wants to embrace the fact that they can take a degree in Ornithology or History or Agriculture or Environmental Science or Climate Change. And to whom am I sermonizing about making rightful – you know zara hatke – career choices when I had to opt for software engineering myself? Well, well, well, my unreserved apologies, milord! But there’s something to seriously think about, isn’t there?

Fairly speaking, I wanted to do something precautious (but definitely subtle, not over the top like Software Engineering I eventually succumbed to) because I thought it would be ultimately very ‘ambitious’ of me if at all, to speak about and logically describe (to whoever was interested to look into my eyes and listen to me when I am talking to them) with a particular inflection and emphasis on the way I have always been: academically inclined and unquestionably romantic that is. I place myself in that holy logical tradition to do something out of ordinary and I know software engineering wasn’t representative of that niche career bracket. Not anymore.

Growing up in the sunny South over the seventies and eighties and over a substantial part of the nineties I did manage to grant myself with the fair amount of personal self-transformation, maybe not hormonally that’s isn’t possible, but attitudinally which is enough to try and stay in touch with the ground realities of my life. I began by appreciating my successes and the successes of others. There was a sense of freedom and release from the two-point agenda of disorienting ambitions that the friends of my generation (school/college mates mostly) had succumbed to the machinations of the non-negotiable contemporaneous parental fetishes. Some did well while others scraped through, for it was quite an awful overburdening thing and yet they carried on as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

For many of us, however, doing computers was not really a natural career choice; it was more like an escape route to quick career-making (but it had stopped being really amazing a career choice; that odd feeling of career-fulfillment differs from person to person), not to mention the promise of rampant ‘IT jobs’ that came along dog-tagged with it. Information Technology (IT) seemed a steal-deal that had an assurance of a job for those people who did computers! But that old feeling of holier-than-thou – my job is better than yours – is gone now; that unmistakable old feeling of a dazzling IT career has more or less been achieved and that is all there is to it, but nothing about the feeling remains special anymore. To be fair, people like us have come a long way from those heady days of wonder when we were studying software programming and alluring stuff like that to get a job and go the untrodden new path and keep up the good work. But not anymore. Really not. Things have changed, often – thanks to financial recession or economic slowdown and extreme competition – taking a turn for the worse for both experienced professionals and fresh-off-the-boat freshers. No one was spared.

All of that previous era’s (the late 1990s) cool, patient ways of doing programming with now-archaic almost prehistoric software tools and languages are gone forever, giving way to an unprecedented, uncertain (AI) Artificial Intelligence-infested, digital technologies-laden, and (ML) Machine Language-personified era where jobs are not so easy to secure and sustaining your job role in the one you have is another big problem. Your number may come up next to face the HR firing squad and when it happens you’ll be asked to make an exit as quickly as possible. The security will carry your belongings and meet you at the office entrance or outside of the main gate! Tata bye-bye!

These days most IT companies bank on handing out one job to two people instead of one. Tada! … In that way, they ‘create’ more jobs: 2 for 1, never mind at the devastating cost of relieving the senior experienced professional hand from his/her duties forthwith. The senior’s job role is given away to 2 freshers or juniors! Who cares? As long as Supply is more than Demand, IT companies can continue to have a field day at being spoilt for choice ‘creating jobs’!

And then there are the aftereffects of the great recession of 2008 that culled thousands if not lakhs of software engineering careers all across our country. According to the Indian IT industry regulatory body NASSCOM, the Indian IT sector only grew by 5% last year (2018). In growth terms 5% is peanuts! What about hiring rates? Sure enough, it slammed shut its door by around 40% in the last 3 years. Laying off employees is the latest rage these days that leading and not-really-leading IT companies indulge in wholeheartedly. For instance, Cognizant pulled the plug off of at least 6,000 jobs, 600 Wipro employees have been relieved of their services, Aircel served pink slips to 700 of its staff.

The Indian IT scene is no longer all that hunky-dory anymore. And I suspect it will ever again going to be like the old days when things were simpler, manageable and there was a great feeling of joy in our hearts more than happy to do the good work that we were doing.

When we thought that the IT industry could not have been worse than this, we have this great piece of news! According to a recent employability report, more than 80% of engineering graduates in the country are not fit for software development jobs or the knowledge market across industries! Wow, What a tragedy! God knows, how this thing can be remedied.

Oh Gosh! Until Computers Came Along

But the point is: If ‘Engineering’ degree was most aptly referred to as a beaten-into-a-purplish-pulp assembly line career production thing, ‘Medicine’ was and still is considered to be one of the noble undertakings and for all the right reasons because the whole point revolved around the fact that there can be too many ‘engineers’ around but never too many doctors, and thank God for it. It takes a lot to be a Doctor while it takes very little to be an Engineer or something like that. The former career alternative, according to my humble opinion (I know I can keep it to myself), demands more discipline and nurturing wisdom than the latter’s new age fastidious shrewdness which can be easily used to grab a seat at any numerous run-of-the-mill private colleges and go through the motions of what one is expected to figure out to pass the exams and make all the stakeholders in this career-making business happy, including nosy neighbours!

To cut a long story short: I thought I passed over all that national illness of being continually asked to become an Engineer, but little did I know that the tables would turn on me when I too will have to give in to the domestic pastime of becoming one such damned species! (If you don’t get medicine, get engineering; that’s the dictum). Soon enough, the din of computer education had arrived in our country and got royally treated like a new gold mine or oil or something. Everybody rushed to it like eagles rushing towards a fine prey. I got enrolled in a software engineering program of study at a gung ho national institute, gave that darn thing 3-and-a-half years of my life, got placed, and the rest is history.

As things stand now, I too am firmly entrenched in the realm of software engineering that sometimes, to be frank, gets my goat. It does, and I know I am not alone trying to wheedle my analytical/mathematical cum arty brain into writing bespoke software solutions that are sellable.

I have dwelt in states of such existential dread that my earliest dream of becoming a medical professional not ever coming true that even the experience of being a software engineer pales in comparison. Still, somewhere deep down that pitiful old misery reaches out from the hungry past to linger in the satiated present; it never abates. And of all things, I had to succumb to the geeky-nerdy world of computer engineering; notwithstanding, of the software category; God, help me. I cannot manage without the kind sympathetic Him/Her into my life. 'Engineering degree' is dead. Long live Engineering degree!

In a lighter vein, if ever I said: give me Medicine and I can readily sacrifice or terminate hundred Engineering career choices! Just know I mean it, Lord knows I mean it. Hasta la vista, baby!

By Arindam Moulick

Postscript: The above essay is the seventh sequel (part 8) to the main essay titled "That Good Old-Fashioned Existential Angst" published in November 2018 on my blog site Pebbles on the Beach. More on this 'dream' theme in my next blog.

Disclaimer: This blog is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Straight from the Heart

High School Reminiscences

Continuing the train of thought from where I left off in my previous contemplative writing, I step aboard again to reflect upon the two life-changing years of love and the ache of longing that never had atrophied to this day or escaped from my memory; especially the unbroken thread of warm nostalgia-laden remembrances of those senior school years I am glad never passes me by. Therefore, this is a no-holds-barred account of those two golden years of my life.

Although I've lately learned that if love can sometimes hurt you, with time or one last meeting, it can also make attempts at healing the pain within you, pain, yes, due to the eternal absence of the person I had often fumbled for words to speak, or the pain of missing out on a life that might have been.

Still, I long for making one more start as long as the words of love and longing in this short story are coming straight from the heart. *

In The Times of Love and Longing

Honestly speaking, the experience of love was seldom uncomplicated to recognize the value of, yet it feels nice to say that occasionally when my heart longs to revisit that special bank of my memory river which, I’m proud to say, never dries out, I feel particularly charmed and absolutely content in the warm glow of the feeling that my memory river still courses its way through to the sea of memories. No wonder I am one big nostalgia freak!

Oh yeah, it feels wondrous, not that it doesn’t, despite the odds and ends I had to confront at that still so unforgettable love ballad of a school which used to lay, the last time I saw, amidst the fragrant groves of trees, long slender grasses, periwinkles, and long-stemmed wild yellow daisies (I learned my biology well); the bird calls and chirps: mostly of common iridescent crows and house sparrows hopping around in ones and twos – among other avian visitors of which, surprisingly, kingfishers and bulbuls were occasionally spotted calling out from the trees – happily picking up pieces of leftover food (discarded from the tiffin boxes); tiny students in white and blue dresses marching to their classrooms. Who can really forget the deep and timeless appeal of the green luxuriant chomp of a playground spread out all the way to the north of the free and bountiful land; the solitary basketball court located right behind our Class Twelfth; charming teachers and the elderly, voluble PT sir; one can easily slip into a sense of deep nostalgia about the general sweet-scented spaciousness of the enchanting environment where our central school was ensconced in a secluded lush green ambiance. Oh, what days were they, so innocent!

How can I not remember the big grassy knoll of ground where during our free periods and games periods we used to play American baseball compulsively because it was the norm; one couldn’t get away from not minding PT Sir’s pleasant but placatory admonition, it was so much fun though playing that peculiar game using a rounded bat (the first time I looked at it I thought: sure everyone’s mother uses one of these not only for washing clothes but also use it for non-congratulatory beatings!) and a plump, blubbery ball thrown at you with a vicious force; the single-storied tiled-roof hut-like edifices for our classrooms; malodorous science labs for teaching us animal anatomy: especially of frogs and white rats specimens upended, spread-eagled, and pinned on all fours on paraffin wax filled aluminum dissecting trays, to expose to view that illusive carotid artery and aortic arch. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack: only here it was a pound of tightly packed rodent flesh. The pop, fizz, and plop of weird yet wonderful chemical experiments (I still can see in my mind’s eye chemistry ma’am’s fierce pair of eyes; one look my way even by mistake would give me, oh gosh, a rash of goose-pimples all over that funnily it took a very long time to subside!), and scraping through the physics lab practical classes by measuring physical quantities with appropriate accuracy using the Chemical Balance and figuring out how to do Resonance experiments using long cylindrical tubes the insides of which buzzed like asphyxiated angry bees – clearly indicative of my experiment going awry! It was supposed to give out nice little boom sounds, and resonate. The experiment was easy but the one that was amply boring to execute! Thanks to the docile and pious Physics Sir, I scraped through the subject.

I still hear the sound of your elfin musky voice in my head, I do, and I can’t stop thinking about your countless interpretations of love scribbled in your love notes from eons ago? I never fail to reminisce when the first note was delivered by the little hands of the brave little soldier and asking for a note in return. To his great credit, courage (you could see at once he was a man of his word) and hopefulness (for his darling sis) were never in short supply for this noble, smart, thinking little buddy. Rarely if ever a little man like him exists today.

“Thanks” (or “thank you” for that matter) is not the word and scarcely apt for what I mean to say about you being so adorable and heaven-sent (of this I am sure)… you came into my life like a bright beacon light of hope and possibility all those years ago. I will not flinch one bit to say again and again that I want to live that divine old life all over again with you, and inevitably along with all others from that so important and unforgettable phase of our lives. Is this possible? Will our paths cross again in the future? The former me yearns to chance upon a meeting with the former you and if ever such a time was to come, I know, I’ll never let go of the precious moments we have cherished of our time together at school. Let’s not change anything; let it be just the same as it was then. Nothing has changed. The Future will change though, the Past never changes and that’s why I find myself holding on to the fond memories of the past, do you? You’d be just the same as you were then and I’d be as I was then, and indeed all others too. How wonderful it will be if we could just go back in time and find love and happiness again? If that’s possible then I am the luckiest man I know, and you’ll be the sole reason if such a great time-travel thing were ever to happen. Oh, I can’t go on any further than what I have been actually meaning to say because words sometimes seem inadequate, and yet I have so much more to say in words and in kind; my tears would choke me … a love so profound it could not be assuaged…

Meditations on Grief, Love, and Loss

[I remember how your overprotective guardian angels had unnecessarily got a nosebleed over this something innocent yet a-lot-like-love thing while giving them heartburn they never knew had existed up till then, poor souls. Methinks, they would have done slightly better in their angry lives (as responsible guardians, of course, no doubt about that!) had they informed themselves better about the bare necessities of human life: one that goes by the name: L.O.V.E., especially the old-fashioned, teenaged type which bides time before turning into something of value for both parties to squabble about on who gets what from the share of their children’s daring propensities. Instead, your guardian angels preferred running around like… putting it gently… headless chickens over something that could have at best been only in the budding stage, lest glowing into a full-blown flower yet! Nip it in the bud? I think it’s a singularly pathetic overreaction to a complete non-issue. Go right ahead then, guardian angels, and…nip it…nip it in your butt and see what happens! You’ll howl and howl again and again! Your folks were hopelessly wrong right from the start of their coming into the know of our little love story… What discreet malice might have roiled in their beastly hearts to have urged them headlong into a blind reproach and a confused point of view of the world apart from one’s vicinity and come knocking on the door of an innocent teenager for no fault of his? How irrational were these parental figures of yours, who apart from ‘loving’ their daughter doesn't realize, don’t mind it at all, in treating their own unsuspecting kids as potential money-making investments to secure a hassle-free, old-age retirement bonus for themselves! Living passports for prosperity and in most cases, it has to be a settlement in an alien land and nothing less than that. Sure there are exceptions though. And sometimes, for better or worse, exceptions don’t count, you know. One may be wrong about this interpretation. But perchance it’s just an interpretation of the malady I just mentioned above, nothing more than that but nothing less either.

Perhaps, a little abstemiousness or self-denial on their part should have been better for them to have, but no, they chose to come running after where their daughter’s “mon ami” lives, and throwing all grace and human dignity to the winds, they, bulked up and all, knocked on the door of innocence and sincerity requesting for a meeting – the party included two individuals with their unrestricted egos in the full exhibition came riding on a primitive-looking scooter. One of them sounded like a veritable Lawrence of Arabia or better still a dark brown-skinned Bajrangi Banjara! And the other one, his escort,: a measly side-kick, snaky mongoose of a person (sorry love… couldn’t resist using the word mongoose to describe that equally brown-skinned manifestation of inhuman contortion!), probably a brother-in-arms/law or some hapless uptight relative of the former one, looking for an opportunity to intimidate “our sweet little teenage love story” with his erratic mutterings – which were completely ill-advised – apropos of a three-legged, untagged gully dog’s pointless yelps!

Afterwards, I tied that long-forgotten scene with a big knotty label that went something like “The Lawrence and His Yelping Hound!” and lobbed it into the dustbins of worthless history post-haste; it was absolutely necessary for me to honour my conscience the way I did and live free of ill-feeling towards these two woolly-headed Mogambos, whatsoever. So I went about my way thinking that it would be nice as well as sincere to carry on without much ado about what just happened than tick a checkbox on the web of my life and live in forced regret that I couldn’t possibly deserve, really not. Honestly, at that time, I had no idea from where such moral courage had ensued, using which I just played cool and went about my business as a teenager in peace with myself. What were they expecting of me? Nervous breakdown? Blackout? By George! What wishful thinking! It was not of my making; they had forced it upon me (us) and I knew it didn't have to be this way at all, totally unnecessary, not worth my time. Regrettably, these folks, guardian gatekeepers of the girl in question, were pea-brained to be gracefully understanding their daughter’s love interest. I hold the opinion that right from day one they turned themselves over on their head and in their blind fury towards anything that suggested ‘teenage love’, especially when their own teenage daughter is involved up to the neck in love, bloodied their mind’s eye, sanity, and senses, more or less. Before long, two of them come riding the horse of manic depression and a misplaced sense of judgment not to make amends but to issue uncalled-for ‘reprimands’ – all this despite the fact that the guardian sentinels were lovers themselves. One would have wished for better sense to prevail on them than their going-out on a hate drive to intimidate an aspirational teenager for practically no fault of his. Like proper radical fanatics, hate and self-righteousness rot had wormed through whatever little brains they might have had in their heads so filled with Defence canteen supplied Rum and other vicious, disparaging poison. Tackling this unexpected scenario was hardly a problem to deal with; I felt absolutely no regrets, not even a whispering hint of it have I felt ever since the day when these two cheeky johnnies were necked out of my premises, with a strongly-worded oral rebuttal.

I clearly remember that day… we sagaciously advised these eccentrics (who came calling upon us) to quit Allwell Parkland immediately and while they are on the run (with their tails firmly affixed between their wobbly legs) they can go seek psychiatric help and while they do that they should get their skulls thoroughly examined for having come this far out to intimidate and get on the nerves of people who don’t care about their misplaced sense of parental botheration; and to suggest prohibiting the innocent students from talking to each other and have the gall to call their relationship as, of all things, “sinful”! Good God, when did love become frickin’ “sinful”!

As soon as these irresponsible men were dismissed, I calmly thought to myself: The world isn’t over yet, and come what may, the show must go on. My simple teenage self knew that little bit of detail of life instinctively, so no worries at all. None was taken. Let her parents eat grass for a day or two and come back to their proper moos…err…senses. And why will the world end when we have just started making our own: for me and of course for my Lawrence girl being at the center of my universe. Our love will find a way. Come check it out, guardian gatekeepers!

We were in love; never were we wounded in love or afraid, as was foolishly assumed by these fatherly honchos, coming from a long line of macho lunatics. Just joking, mon amour. For all their misplaced patronizing concern: we continued loving each other like two unafraid teenagers are supposed to while in love, which is to say neither did we terminate our fair relationship nor did we stop talking to each other, we continued our dalliance unhindered. Nope, I wasn’t afraid, and I knew my strengths and was prepared to become aware of my rights, and stuff like that. Nor did I think she was afraid. (She wasn’t. She was a pretty intelligent and mature girl to take her guardians’ “gatekeeping activity” in her stride. Right from the start, she was resolved about us being in a relationship. Love, at first sight, has its brilliance.) Nor did I show any deference – of which I was as a teenager so incapable – to anyone, not even to one of her parents working as a teacher, her guardian sentinel at the school. So stern was she that you are sure to lose your consciousness simply by catching her stare! I mean, you’ll run the risk of hitting a wall you thought was not there in the first place or suddenly have wobbly legs that don’t move, or you’ll lose your footing and trip over on the ground; your feet you thought were quite capable enough until a moment ago have all at once become mere stumps! If truth be told, while in school my girl and I kept an eye on one another more intensely; we studied well and at the same time looked out for each other obsessively. She did better than most in all the subjects. Whereas for me it was a culture shock at first, then the overwhelming reality of everything I was seeing and feeling for the first time in my life in a K.V. has gone on to create a paucity of cleverness and intelligence, nevertheless, I did far better than I was doing when I started out in that love ballad of a school I loved so much going to every day. Of course, I pulled up my socks well enough high to carry forward the legacy of being a hopeful student, so to say. So keeping an eye out for each other was something we did all the time because we were crazy about each other. Other than that, it was just the beginning of a roving magical affair that held many like-minded school students in complete thrall attracted to our dewy prettiness and tender fondness with which we were smitten in the school campus, we bloomed. The pointlessly brute admonition coming from my girl’s guardian gatekeepers … Nah!... it didn’t affect us one bit. I admit, for a day or two I was a little perturbed by their audacity and the bleeding gall to come up to my door with their cowardly attitude, but soon I trashed it, shrugged it off, and moved on without giving it a second thought that it didn’t deserve. So obviously, I turned my nose up at their display of narrow-mindedness because I didn’t think it had enough status I should be giving them the credit for. Afterwards, I said to myself: Never going to happen. The feeling we had for each other is never going to cease. And it never did. Never will. Love happens like that; it’s no lab project that you start to finish or end when you’re told to end it. It’s a sweet accident, it just happens and there are no rights or wrongs. Nothing else matters. What matters is…just love in the face of whatever admonition this world is known to employ. We’ll jolly well do what we think is right for us. Her guardians’ ‘gatekeeping’ be damned. They can go climb a wall or something and knock themselves out! No one can dictate terms to us, least of all the miserable brown-skinned heap of human apparitions. And so, we continued to meet day after day (passionately) as though nothing has happened; wrote a copious amount of notes to each other (relentlessly), kissed like starves during the free periods (lingeringly), and hugged/embraced in the intervals (firmly) – thanks to our heart’s scandalous desire we were more astute than most other potential lovers at the school (at least the girls’ parents didn’t have to gripe about their love story) had claimed to be. Guardian gatekeepers of my girl please note.

Ultimately, we just knew how to lay our short school lives at the Time’s altar and hoped to become some kind of Eternal Lovers regardless of whether we realized or not that we might be bound, in the end, to eventually lose the wonderful days of our love for each other to the vast unknowable future of time. If every cloud has a silver lining, then ours too had one. Perhaps, the fault was in our stars. Yet, at the end of it all, we won over our separate sacred destinies by becoming – eternal lovers, to love each other forever.] - as told to me by my unfortunate buddy.

Two Years: Memories of the Past

Those were the golden days I’ve never forgotten, and God please may I entreat you to take me back in time and make me dance, sing, hum teenager back again, and send me back to the DMC (domestic) area (of the great countryside of the north) where our school lay coolly amidst the gentle breeze in the verdant valley so full of lush greenery abutting that wild, dark and leafy orchard we rarely ever dared to enter. How I miss those days.

Come with me, mon amour, I’ll take you away back to those innocent fun-filled times of our senior school. We’ll shine like the bright sun and glow like the full moon; run around the high neem and peepul trees; we’ll learn, revise, and cram our lessons; drink profusely chlorinated drinking water from the school steel drum alight on a poor four-legged wooden stool; ogle at each other in the science labs and get caught mid-ogle! Come away with me, dear, I’ll be waiting for you. We’ll go back in time and never return. Will you come with me now?

This intense yearning for the nostalgic snows of those golden days of our love and longing has been safely locked away in the vault of my imagination, and until the day when we find our way back into the reckoning I shall keep them hidden away from the prying world, I promise.

Epilogue

The above story has been gleaned from the scrapbook of memories that belonged to one of my dear friends.

However, most of what he told me about his love story at Allwell Parkland where we resided was too secretive and heart-touching than some people would normally give credit for, and maybe due to that reason alone it never got any mention in the green diary he kept for the longest time with him, except a scattering of love poems he wrote verbatim from poetry books he borrowed from the school library. Instead, thanks to his better judgment, he laid bare his soul to me; told me stories in bits and pieces – over several years – of his old romance with this intelligent girl from a life lived a long time ago, way back in the late nineteen-eighties.

The fact is (it feels like almost a lifetime ago) I used to know this innately nostalgic person up close and personal, who keeps remembering old times and had a photographic memory of his past. He felt nostalgic all the time: Most often a different time period and place than the one he was living in was better, he’d often say, for the sake of immersing deeply in one’s nostalgia and feeling complete about one’s sense of being. He used to tell me that he feels devoid of inspiration and creativity if he sticks to “today’s reality” or “current reality”. “Today’s reality” used to bore him and therefore no chance for inspiration. For him, however, his past was more important than his present, and we hardly ever talked about the future because he believed that the future is bound to be grim, which would be devoid of nostalgia, nature, and feelings of genuine happiness. Besides, on account of being passionate about the times of his own past, he often used to get very nostalgic about the 1950s and 60s India, especially the kind of artistic, scientific, and culturally exceptional the great city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) was known to be. Together with Calcutta, even the charming but ruined city of Bombay (now Mumbai) in the romantic 50s and 60s was one of the best places to ever happen to humankind of this part of the world, not to mention the old-world historic Delhi and the traditionally Carnatic city of music and classical Indian dance Chennai (earlier Madras). This apart, the quaint little places and sleepy towns of the deep south like Pondicherry, Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram), Thanjavur, including north Indian states like Aligarh and Shimla were of particular importance to him. He had a huge fascination for both city and country life: the quiet countryside of Thanjavur, Kottayam, Madurai, Kanyakumari, and many other places where living life would have been quite different and unforgettable.

Only he doesn’t know, cannot ever know because he is gone now, that some of these quiet little places with charming little names have virtually turned into squalid urban metropolises, which are now populated with people and more people jostling for space and sustenance; and not to speak of tall buildings, taller than humankind’s egos decimating environment and every square inch of the living spaces, irreversibly. And to what end? To scar the earth and make more room for the hordes of people looking to own manmade cement structures for their own ilk. Thanks to our opening up of our economy – economic liberalization or what I cynically call as a reverse Robin Hood drive: you know, taking from the poor and giving to the rich – an endless cycle of humankind’s insatiable greed for fast-depleting natural resources has been unleashed upon the planet. God save this third rock from the sun.

And he was not even born at the time for which he constantly felt nostalgic. But above all, the city of Calcutta (the subcontinent's London. I never fail to notice that whenever I am there) and Bengal were most exceptionally-attractive for him mostly because of his origin; he pined for it to touch his every waking day of his life.

A Young Life Gone Too Soon

Upon leaving the Allwell parkland campus permanently, he could never again persevere through his life or his effusive imagination about his long-lost years of love and longing, and not much long after death removed him from among us close friends. After he passed away, his three college buddies had made up their minds to make their quiet exit from those hauntingly wonderful years of great friendship and all things beautiful that life could ever offer them back in the truly extraordinary time of the early 1990s. His was a life that had ended a long time ago, but a little too early. Sadly, he was gone too soon.

His hitherto unknown love story has been dedicated to his growing up years on the wonderful Allwell parkland campus; (one other fictitious name I had derived for naming this special residential place is Paliwall Estate). As I think back now, I feel that many years ago life was indeed much less intense than what it currently is. Today, it’s tough to live a basic human life that is natural to human nature. Machines and robots have taken over, not to mention the latest piece of gimmickry chatbots! In the same way, it’s even tougher NOT to think about money and things like that to get by in life even as our society/community has us chase for things we don’t frickin’ require. What a life we are leading! Everybody is busy running, not realizing that walking is okay too. These days everything has to be complex, confusing, and downright ludicrous, and rarely if ever anybody bothers about trying to live a simpler sans carbon-free life. Omigod! I shudder to think what will become of us ultimately. Ashes, what else!

Allwell parkland campus was a remarkable place, a place I can never forget that I once was an inseparable part of. Like Cyndi Lauper sings in her wonderful 1984 song, I too have almost left behind the suitcases of my memories, time after time. “If you're lost you can look and you will find me / Time after time / If you fall I will catch you, I will be waiting / Time after time” – Cyndi Lauper (Time After Time). According to my recently developed pessimistic outlook towards life, I still maintain that life is not worth anything to be head over heels in affection with. Not anymore. I’ll just let life pass then. I don’t seem to have any use for it anymore. It’s not good to ask why. Because Times have changed and with that also changed the pure essence of human life and the romanticism of places where we grew up, too, have been irreparably damaged beyond familiarity and understanding, especially for those who have lost their love interest forever. Correct me if I am wrong: isn’t it true that love is not the same as it was once a long time ago, and everything afterwards that came can be termed as a mere waste of time? Yet, life goes on. Life has gone on.

Alas, life was much simpler and easier when Apple and Blackberry were just juicy fruits and not some kind of tormenting pandemonium of techno-junk pieces that depletes humanity day after day, slow-poisoning us to an unknown and unwept death, and therein lies Freud’s Civilizations and its Discontents.

By Arindam Moulick

*I couldn’t resist using the title of the Bryan Adams song “Straight from the Heart” as an apt title for this blog. Needless to say, I love that song.

Also, click here to read "Those Two Wonderful High School Years" and "A Love Long Ago".

Postscript: The above essay is the sixth sequel (part 7) to the main essay titled "That Good Old-Fashioned Existential Angst" published in November 2018 on my blog site Pebbles on the Beach. More on this 'dream' theme in my next blog.

Disclaimer: This blog is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.