So long...Farewell...

It is an exceptionally clear bit of memory I've got from back in school. Our family was going somewhere...and as we inched ahead painfully on the Sri Aurobindo Marg...my father pointed towards the right and said.."IIFT is there...good place for MBA in International Business". "Though IIMs are what one should aim for," he said in the same breath.Frankly speaking...I had no idea what MBA was...being more interested in Aeronautics, FBI, and Journalism as career options (alternated religiously between the 3)...but "International Business" sounded way cooler than only MBA..whatever that was...IIFT sounded a better bet than the IIMs :D

But then I grew older...not particularly wiser...and like all others decided that CAT was THE exam to give...and IIMs were worth dying for...IIFT was long since forgotten.

But there it came up again...T.I.M.E said it was a great institute...so zi dutifully filled up the form. November 20th...I went and messed up my CAT, and on 27th with the last bit of ambition and self confidence snuffed out of me...I gave the IIFT entrance.

13th December...I was dressing up for a wedding when my best friend called and blabbered excitedly.."You...IIFT...you...congrats!"....I nearly choked...
One thing led to the other...and I found myself entering the gates for the first time to pay up (had happily locked my car keys in...sigh...signs of what was to happen regularly).

The moment I entered...I felt like I belonged here...the campus was small..and no big grassy football field like the one I had back in college...but I fell in love with the place....and the love affair continued...2 years went by faster than ever.

From being the reserved girl...who had never been out of her house for more than a couple of hours a day...I spent many a night under obscure streetlights on campus...in order to study in peace!

At the end of the 1st Trisem...studies were no longer that important...and I had developed the knack of studying with 5 other people and plenty of activity in the room!

Time went on...friends were made...relationships changed...NEW friends were made...some were just discovered in the fag end of my stay...but I know they are for keeps....

Night life was discovered...from sleeping at 10 religiously...I realized that the star-lit sky is a lot prettier at 3-4 in the morning...walks then are amazingly educative...Delhi roads are amazing to drive on post 1 in the night...24/7 is a boon...CCD is heaven...Big Chillz is the ultimate gastronomic delight...the laptop is a necessity...as is music...there are tonnes of amazing movies that are a lot more educative than any book you've ever read...What people do does NOT define them...there is always more to them than meets the eye...

My first party at IIFT was the first such event I had ever attended! Never before had I seen so many drunk people together at once!

I realized the importance of differentiating between following one's heart...and simply bowing to peer pressure...

That watching movies is most fun when you are doing it on the sly in the middle of a boring lecture...

That ....
I can go on forever...

Life at IIFT has alas come to an end...and I know that these have been the best 2 years of my life...Loads to look forward to again...but these memories will be cherished forever :)

Illusion...

Retreat...for once...mentally, not physically...try being honest and nothing but honest for a whole day...try it...Just hold back and watch yourself from the outside...

How many times do you smile when you don't want to? How many times do you jabber away to glory...all cheerful at the face of it...but mentally cursing the person or yourself..it doesn't matter...

The illusion you create to the world in general...try ripping it apart...

It is hard...very hard...imagine not laughing at a friend's joke coz you never found it funny...and you decided to stand your ground today for once...is it his fault that he's hurt? ...not really...it's yours...you should have told him that in the first place itself...

Don't humour yourself...don't humour anyone else...for one day...just ruthless honesty...bring down the facade...

Imagine if you wake up one morning...in a strange land...where no one knows you...and you can reach no one...you have no one to justify anything to...no one to prove anything to...you don't need to pretend what you aren't (hard...considering by now the line between what you are and what you pretend has nearly blurred)...you don't have to worry about your basic food/water/shelter...just do what you have to...what will you do?

Maybe I'm talking nonsense...movies do that to me...always...

But I keep going back to that scene in Fight Club where Brad Pitt holds a gun to the guy's head and says what is it that you really want to do...(It doesn't work without a gun I guess...or my imagination is just no good)...I still come up with a couple of probables (sigh...number crubching doesn't figure anywhere in that)...but not sure...still not sure...

But maybe that's OK...I will take my time and figure it out...if the world seems to know where it is going...doesn't necessarily mean I have to too, does it? If what 100 people think is normal becomes normal for all...we are nothing but a bunch of robots then...the remote being the 100 that set the trend...

What if theirs' too is a facade...say Hello to mine...I'll say Hello to yours...without anyone knowing what or who they actually are saying hello to. Sometimes they may get a feeling that something is amiss...but it's much easier to pretend all is well and same as before than actually shaking the hornet's nest, isn't it? Who knows if you will ever recover from the stings?

So together we weave the grand illusion...and are happy to get lost in it...but try retreating...like I said before...maybe you'll find it hard to get enmeshed again...

Flashback...

It started with an unusal request...one of my closest friends from school had sent me an orkut invite to "Join the Sandwich Club". Memories came gushing back. I got transported to my middle school days...when the 6 of us ... "Mystery Club" fanatics... and solemn believers in the adventures of "Famous Five" and "Secret Seven"... spent many a glorious spring/summer/autumn/winter afternoon "snooping" around that famous Aurobindo statue in school... looking for clues...to what I don't know...(vaguely remember thinking that someone had changed the direction in which the statue was facing!).

We had our codes...we had our "club" notebooks...we loved the same music and danced away endlessly to the same songs over and over again! When a classmate sent me "Theme for a Dream" by Cliff Richard today... I was totally overwhelmed...because that was the first English song I had fallen in love with when I was 9 or something...The 6 of us used to lounge around in each others' houses on the pretext of working on some project or the other...and spend a considerable time listening to music or reading books that transported us into a fantasy land... where we created our own stories...

We dressed up for Halloween...blew up one of the gang-members' neighbour's electricity supply by sending a rocket there on Diwali (it was an accident...but we trusted the craziest girl of the lot to light the damn thing!). We fought too...but made up soon enough...couldn't stay apart for too long..

We dreamt big then...and refused to fall prey to the pseudo standards set by the world...

I miss them all...the pranks we played...the games we invented...the books we read... and most importantly...the standards we set for ourselves...

Time to awaken that child again...