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...