I was travelling across the misty fields of water lotuses wandering with random thoughts that have been an inner world to a chaotic self, how else I would have taken my life just one year back. Amused, dazed, phlegmatic of almost everything, in a world which was an illusion for close to 21 years
and then one Friday night, changed everything.
Teleporting myself (read, every Spartan) to 24th February 2011, I had worries of a gaped career, a halted future and an equally vocal excitement. If that morning someone would have asked how do I feel, I would have surely said “exhausted”. With the dipping sun, the mist in my life settled.. My boat of a solitary traveler shored into a new land. A land where the first step seemed a million milestones far, where looking at a stranger with a hope of security defined insignificance. A place of knowledge or another animal farm right out from the unspoken words of Orwell’s novel. A place that the dictionary of intellectualism calls “the B School (read: my B School, Great Lakes)”
As I reached far across my hometown leaving a handful of folks who cared, for an education which promised to change me into anything but ordinary. for better or for worse is a question in a limbo, that night I lay watching the ceiling of my hostel room for as many number of hours as I can’t count. Time seemed endless; life seemed empty, like a washed slate awaiting scribbles…
“Hey Hi, which room are you??”
That’s how a sunny warm morning started, My first friend.. My neighbor..
Never had been room numbers as significant as the first few days of a hostel life. with time the jig started. The fight…of assignments, pre-reads, marks, friendship, groups, partying, late nights, emotions and the entire of everything that one wants to experience on a road to freedom for the last time in his life. 100 days, 300 hours of sleep, 500 assignments, tests, grades, competitions; suddenly the meaning of life went simpler. No more moments were the memories of a happening past, no more they were of coping up, they were of survival and right in the middle of everything the animal farm nurtured itself into utopia. A utopia I call my second home; this very world, changed. Anything outside the four walls was a simile to an alien land and right here, within the constructs of marketing strategies and financial ratios did I find comfort.
My comfort of great friendship, my comfort of support, of securities; my comfort of achievements, of goals I would have never dared dreaming, my comfort of care, of affection, my comfort of a second family where dreams were cherished, madness was rejoiced, anger was beheld and a comfort where all illusions broke loose.
No, Life did not stop being what it used to be, it had all its share, betrayal, unfaithful friendships, sadness, tears. Like everybody’s from distress to glory this college life had all of it. But in all those mishaps did it teach how to glow from your vanishing remains. After a bitter discourse under a blanket of cold winter night did one of them spoke something which I would carry a long, long way
“A million year old friendship need not be one for the rest of your life, if aint realized, if aint respected, if aint deserved”
Another evening, another sky full of a silver moon, an amphitheater running amok with prospective mentors, CEOs, entrepreneurs. Emphatic it would sound, but never one would find a story from rags to riches so close to see. Never one would see so many unemployed turning millionaires over night. Never one would feel the angst, agony, passion, fight and glory unless one gets to be a part of it.
“Right in the middle of desert, one finds an oasis… The traveler is just a passing moment… That which realizes the glory of it is the desert” – Rumi
Today, after exactly one year I feel, I’ve grown a million years, wised a million times, and redefined my understanding of how far can I pull myself before to call it quits. For good or for bad, would tell the test of time. But this animal farm has rebelled and morphed into its ‘genuinity’ which was somewhere lost midst the long blinding beliefs. Amazingly the difference is only self-realized.
The multitude of future citizens (read: mamalas and many more to join) of this very utopia each of us would know that the boundaries of dreams and capabilities are woven beneath the blanket of doubt, the one who rises above the cover to a boundless sky, capability as a word seizes to define the final limit rather re-defines as a synonym to milestone.
“Remember, the beauty of intellect is never observed but only realized – Bus. Rev.”
~
Debashree (Spartan)
P.s. The L’Attitude 2012 blog site ‘http://lattitude1305-2012.blogspot.in/‘
Photography by Shiva, Suvasree, Joseph, Nilotpal and Dagar.
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