Sunday, June 17, 2007

The wind of yesteryears


It was the evening of the 25th of May. Engineering was all over but for a little slip of paper in our folders which would say "B. Tech, NIT Kurukshetra". Four years of mismanagement and brutish survival coming to a much awaited end. The hostel was nearly empty as most of my friends left behind their eventful RECK life with hardly a backward glance. I, assuming my usual place amongst the stragglers chose to extend my stay a day longer than my friends had chosen to.

As I sat enjoying my final evening at the "khokha" pondering over a cup of tea, out of the blue, there awoke a powerful wind. The sky darkened with approaching clouds, as they were dragged along by the persistent wind. The dust twirled along with the wind, as though it was drawn to its mournful wail. Walking back to the hostel, I could feel the wind exert itself as it rushed along to get to who knows where. The handful of people who were still in the hostel were all out on the grounds or in their verandahs, responding to some unspoken agreement. They laughed and talked aloud, but only to hide their anxiety for the bitter-sweet bits of their lives that the wind was sweeping away.

The wind howled and slammed its way through the now empty corridors, knocking on the occasional unfastened window. For sure in a couple of months, a new batch would move into the hostel and there would be life once more in that quiet place. But not the same persons that I had spent such precious moments with over the past 4 years, not the same jokes that we had laughed to and not the same fears that we had faced in moments of adversity. The sum of hostel life will probably never change, but the substance surely will, with every new batch. The comfortable pillow of familiarity that the hostel had provided us with was being ripped in to shreds.

The wind was intent on its purpose. Puff out the old, ring in the new! Abandoned posters, neglected clothes, forgotten photographs, all rustled along in a rush to get out of the way, as the circle of our lives turned yet another revolution.

6 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

Mind blowing chronicles there, sire! I still remember the day too.. Eeriely though, OUR last day on campus, 22nd of May for us,witnessed similar weather conditions..guess this is just RECK's way of saying goodbye.. Though i'm not too sure RECK can be puffed out of all RECKers so easily(and vice versa).. Welcome to my world of foolish optimism :)
Your in(k)sanity though seems to hold testimony to the same.. :)

Rahul Sachdev said...

As usual Mr.Editor(The Helios) always manages to give me goosebumps everytime he decides to pen his walk down memory lane.Well i was among the ones who had already become part of the yesteryears while the wind was sweeping away our debris, I can still visualise exactly what the place would be looking like then.Partly because of the clarity with which each mood of RECK is tapped into my brains....and majorly because of the command that CHIEFI has over his pen.KUDOS!! Please keep posting....a very honest and humble request from the guy in the cubicle next to yours!!!

Unknown said...

(Sigh),..Guess the character of "Sauron" in this parlance awaits my ink.It's a crappy ordeal, but why I do it is pretty straightforward.

Firstly, in the dismal and confused sludge of opinion and half-truth that make up all artistic theory and criticism, nothing comes close to being as entertaining as the sneer & half-baked ridicule of a snivelling rubbernecker like moa:D.
Secondly,You asked for it grandson :D.
Now, although I'm quite certain that A.Tennyson is gonna roll in his grave by your "careless trod"(Tennyson wannabe) in the proximities of the formers copyright on the usage of "inanimate euphemism"(using inanimate to portray emotional content),your fragmented simile's although quite unrelated and loosely bound to the core of the times, the fragmentation(<--the culprit) of thought leads it more towards the "aftermath decadence" than towards the more obvious failed attempt at "gray colloquialism" (E.g.The 12th Night by Shak,"For all the maidens doth bloom'd in his amaranthine glory(+++pos) have withered (-neg)").The afer-taste it leaves is anything but nostalgia.That is exactly what killed both the purpose and your intent to portray the contrary, which is the main functions of art,to give you a collective sense of belonging,You look at some picture and think, ‘I’ve had that thought, somebody had the same perception as me!

With all that said,reading it was quite a revelatory process.I mean, I won't say it hasn't been a tiring one at times, but I've had an incredible amount of fun reading it, fun in the most profound sense of the word.I'm hoping that every "recker" out there would be able to find something that they can identify with, perhaps at a very intimate level. Even if it's only some fantasy that they thought they alone were harboring :D. It's like having an idea that we are unable to articulate or express, but then we see somebody who has managed to express that idea in a painting, a piece of music, or a piece of prose like you, we get that incredible reassurance that only real art can give us that we're not alone, that somebody else feels the same way we do.
With that said, I'm sure the length of my criti-Q-ue reeks of applause :D

Grandpa Sinha

Srinath said...

What i like best about the post was that it wasn't studded with 'unintelligible' words. The intent was not to impress, neither to confuse but to express . Roy does the job wonderfully well.

You can hardly choke back the feelings which rush to you upon reading this blog.
Keep writing Roy so that we can read , learn & comment.

Jerrin said...

more than two years down the line...i can clearly visualise the day...though not fortunate enough to actually see it, Roy you brought out what it felt to a lot of us...very nostalgic!