REMINISCENCES OF A CONFUSED MIND

As three and half years of my college life have come to an end, time has come to put pen onto paper.
Now is the time for retrospection. A general question everyone asks themselves is, ‘what I have achieved in these years?’. I would beg to differ and reinstate the things I have felt, thought, seen, learnt and unlearnt.

I still remember how pleasant it was as a tiny toddler to enter school. Entry into college was in complete contrast. It was a rude awakening. A complete shake-up. It was the first time many of us were going to stay alone. Our lives were placed completely in the hands of our seniors, the futile attempts of the hostel wardens notwithstanding.

Though hidden sources forewarned us of the shattering experiences of ragging and associated events, we, being suave wannabes, shrugged away the realities and believed ourselves to be invincible. Let me leave the gross details to imagination. Ragging, though started off in a lighter vein by an unassuming soul, assumed staggering proportions. The dual combination of mental and physical ragging tore us apart. As an upshot, we lived together like never before and like there was no after. The Spirit of unity flowed through our veins and we became comrades-in-arms. This was one thing that hostel thought us in plenty, which would never have hit us with our parents. Nostalgia flooded our corridors. We learned to adjust and accept. We learnt to adopt and adapt to the changing situations. There were many challenging situations which required immediate, clever getaways. Small fights to be solved amicably. Plethora of awkward situations to be doled out slyly.

The way we managed money was another thing we learnt. Now we were adults with full fledged bank accounts and ATM cards, which we swiped at our whims and fancies. Though most of us ended up overspending and asking for more (there were some who saved too, to our amazement!!), it thought us the basics of spending, sharing, insights into accounting, money management and where not to spend (?).

No memoir can be complete without mentioning the most important commodity that keeps us running, food. Though the initial few weeks of hostel food offered a welcome change from the monotonous food at home, it soon turned out to be bland and insipid. What used to be an eagerly awaited blare, the dinner siren, turned into an unnecessary din that came to be frowned upon. This led to increasing forays into the eateries adorning the roads as well as the refuge for the connoisseurs. People fought for titles of who had the longest hotel-eating streak, which leads us back to details of paragraph no 4.

Semester exams were one of the least things that bothered us, we being a bunch of optimistic, happy-go-free lads. The ground reality of exam warrants another story, beyond the scope of this one. The innumerable night outs, mounting pressure, unsurpassable exams, butterflies in the stomach and the usual freaking out afterwards can never be explained in words.

Apart from the chai and chit-chat phenomenon, there was something more to our friendship. There was a golden thread of understanding between us that only people living in 3x4 cubicles next to each other could forge. Is it the physical proximity or the metaphysical embodiment?

This was the last stage of ‘no strings attached’ friendship, which gains a negative perspective ripe with cunning forebodings, jealous pangs and hypocritical attitudes, faster than a pupa turning into a butterfly. I strongly believe that friendship, just like any other human emotion is in its purest form when our life starts and gains evil intonations, identical to a rolling snowball from a zenith transforming into an avalanche that could eat away life, in both the cases.

As much as it has thought me to stand up on my own, hostel life has made me look irksome to others (especially when am at home). Irrefutable freedom guaranteed comes with its flipside, the haughty and headstrong individual who has increasingly less regard for advices and experiences. But in a way this is what makes you a man (chauvinism not intended :-)) who can stand up to the intimidating world outside his spectrum.

Many incidents made me ponder a lot. I have a simple mind, sometimes gullible. My heart paints a rosy, perfect picture of the world. My mind asks me to beware. Eventually my heart wins the tussle and I end up getting snubbed (hopefully not slaughtered) by the world. Not that I can’t re-battle, I don’t want to. I don’t want to fight at every juncture of life’s turnings. I don’t want to turn my life into a battlefield, an arena of mental turmoil. Many questions haunt the corridors of my mind. Why are hypocrites the way they are? Why do they have to wreck havoc in others lives? Why isn’t selfishness a virtue? After all, we are born alone in this world. Isn’t it fitting to place our needs before others?

I have no other choice. I Am a rat surrounded by hypocritical snakes, waiting for one wrong move. Living with cynics, hypocrites and sadists has rubbed these qualities on me. In any case, I am also a chameleon trying to learn the colors of nature to save my skin.
I always knew these sort of people existed but I picturised myself to be a messiah who could turn them around. But, with only hope our principles cannot last long. There needs to be something concrete to strengthen it up.

Somewhere along the line I learnt to live in Rome as Romans do. Here again rises the question of idealism vs practicality. I have witnessed the heights of hypocrisy and cynicism. So slowly and surely I keep getting sucked into these murky waters and hope against hope to stop, before it becomes apocalyptical…

Writer’s note : please forgive the alternating strong and light-hearted paragraphs. After all, life’s the same way, ain’t it?