I want to be.

One afternoon in class 8th, our teacher had raised her voice and asked us,''Each of you tell me what do you want to become in your life?'' Replies were heard, most of them wanted to become engineers and doctors. There were few who wanted to be teachers,CAs and IAS officers, rest cited what their bench mates wanted to be. There were friends who were good at portraying teachers with big noses in the last pages of their book,never intended to be cartoonists, friends who were so good with free-kicks and cover-drives, none of them replied to be a footballer or a cricketer, the ones who had designed the stage for the annual function never thought of being an architect. Today most of them are engineers,even the always wanting to be doctors, teachers, IAS officers are engineers. All of them, including me even, are on the way to achieve things which we thought could not be achievable if we went to be something else in life in India especially. Is that the truth of are life, we never explored. In our 20s we are earning good, have a bunch friends to enjoy with, a comfortable life, a job which is manageable , which sums of our life lived till now as the best one could get.at our age. We were happy till the other day, when the same old teacher mailed us asking another question to us,''Each of you tell me did you become what you wanted to be in you life?'' Replies weren’t heard in the classrooms this time, but the answers were made to oneself, and the conscious was bitter, it was cheated, carrying the guilt to have opted the easier way out for the attainment of things that were needed and required. This night I sleep dreaming of old artifacts lying deep down in some dungeon, I sleep dreaming of discovering tombs and coffins, of studying old clay pots, that noon I had stood up and answered,'' Madam, I want to be an archaelogist''.

cheers,

dipankar

Good old time.

It was the first time I was away from home, away from my parents, I was 17 years old then. Life unexpectedly took me away from Mumbai, asked me to settle down at Paralakhemundi,Orissa. I didn’t refuse, it offered me no choice. I was sad at heart, morose over the thing that I landed up in such an engineering college-JITM. I look back now,after 4 years,I know how wrong I was to hold those dreadful thoughts and enter my hostel-room. Suddenly things changed, life opened up,brought in surprises. Endless nights spent in a senior room entertaining him ( please don’t ask me how?), long queues in the library to get hold of a Boylestead or a Kreysig, eyes trying to search pretty girls in boring lectures, formation of a big-gang which rested under the gulmohar tree right through-out the evening holding samosa and aloo-chopp plates( yeaa the payments to the samosa-fellow was done when we passed out as engg grads !! ),small fights over a game of cricket, protests held because the only pretty madam was made to resign ( just kidding, I dnt remember the hunger-strike), the celebrations during Holi where the shirts were torn right in front of the girls hostel ( yeaa..i know what u r thinkin, they never came out ), numerous picnics at waterfalls near the hills behind the college, the nights spent playing cricket in the corridors,from watching korean romantic movies to mallu movies ( not the adult ones alright  ) to the early morning Runndevi Puri-sabji, the drowsy walks to the wash-basin and dashing to classes without bath, permanent occupants of the last benches, famous as the late-comers, a mad attempt to study everything with 12 hours to go for the exam, hiding those hand-made cheats in toilet sinks, dancing in those processions with the intake capacity of 4 litres of bhang ,boozing till the exam results came, and boozing after the exam results ,all of it would form memories.Memories of friends who clung to each other, cried in joy and sadness, today are distances apart, but still a common thread would bind all of us, these memories. I love you,JITM.
Cheers,
dipankar