October in Dehra

Yaad hai aaj bhi
woh waqt dheema sa
mausam bhi october ka
woh dehra ka mausam geela sa
halke kohre ke saath
un sard subahoh ka agaaz
kaapte haathon se pakde handle
us cycle aur kuch yaaron ka saath
school ka roz woh safar
woh halki dhoop
main khilkhilata aasmaan neela sa
palta aaj ek panna saalon baad
na jaane kyon khud se hi maine
aur laga jaise shayad yaadoon main hi rahega ab
woh barso pehle beeta hua waqt dheema sa
mausam bhi october ka
woh dehra ka mausam geela sa

Nostalgia 3

Nostalgia main mausam ka itna bada haath kaisa hota hain mujhe nahi pata, even now when i remember about school I clearly remember and associate the winters to the blazer, the darker pants that we wore, the goosebumps on those beautiful girls, the lazing around in the recess in warm mountain sun....and I remember the summers with those huge trees around the campus and us playing, chatting, loitering in their shade, the kreamy ice cream wala and those milton water bottles that were mandatory to carry.
Time changes so drastically and so completely that sometimes you doubt the significance of the present, when it too will just be some random memories of your future, am reminded of 'The unbearable lightness of being'. Haii Kundera, how you write such things? How?, Kher will lament my lack of talent later, Kaise inta significance dete hain hum apne aapko, aapne decisions ko, apne time ko kahan hain woh? kisko yaad hain?
Sirf tumhe..aur woh bhi dhundhla...
I remember how after class X, all of us started coming to school without bags, became a fashion statement, was stupid and insanely difficult to manage with all our tuitions for JEE in full flow.
Uff Remember all the Loneys, Marons, Bermans, Hall and Knights, H C Verma, Irodov aur Morrison and Boyd etc etc....'Optics toh sabse achha Resnik Halliday main hain, maine kara hain wahan se'...logon ki faadne ke liye this was enough...for two or three days people would definitely go and see Resnik and then come back to H C Verma, btn optics was really good in Resnik...:)
My generation was unique in the sense that liberalization concided with our coming of age, a touch too young and we would have missed waiting for wednesdays to watch Chitrahaar, renting VCRs to watch four movies in a row the entire night, making list of the popular songs and getting them recorded in a blank audio cassette(with the sony ones reserved for english saangs - a combination of poor bands like Boyzone, BB, Aqua haha), going to internet for only porn...also the rise of the media and middle class ambitions meant that IITs IIMs were made our dreams, working in silicon valley became the sapna of every one in my gen..all my friends became engineers.
Not to say that once I went to NIT Surat I started a different chapter of my life, Unlike today no mobile phones, no anti ragging directions and no Girls!! and here i find myself, in Gujarat studying to be a mechanical engineer...fodu time...will need some posts to capture...

Nostalgia - 2

I still remember my first day at Cambrian Hall, dad came to drop me to school, to show me my classroom 3-D. Embarrassed and shy i was just waiting for him to leave, i don't know why?, aaj agar woh hi alok mere saamne aa jaye toh pata nahi main kaisa react karunga. Strange how we are disconnected to our past, slowly but surely, memories fade, people change and what remains is a faint recollection of past the way we want to remember it. Do i remember that day in april 1990 when i first went to my school, do i remember the ride, the weather, do i remember dad as he was then, do i remember my mother's anxious face, do i remember her giving me my water bottle and tiffin, do i remember my emotions..do i remember me?. Aaj april 2010 hain, 20 years since then, a long time, long enough to change everything. Long enough for a kid watching He-Man in doordarshan on sunday mornings to grow up and worry about searching for jobs on networking sites, long enough for a small girl with white ribbons in her hair and a carefree laugh like no one else to vanish in nostalgia and worry about the vicissitudes of life, long enough to claim that i remember those days.

Classes just went by 3rd, 4th, 5th. I remember my best friend Sandeep Pant, the cutest guy you will ever find, i remember his stammer, remember when he first claimed that he loved Y**** (hope she doesn't mind now), remember the day when one girl, whom incidentally we trusted and told his sad love story to, went straight to Y once the lecture was over and gave her all the details about his doomed liking, The looks that she gave us that day haha...and the way she cried, we were so scared till our class teacher Ms Malini Pandey came to our rescue... the best thing about remembering past is that our memory selectively chooses only the nicest of feelings, incidents, meetings, choti choti baatein ekdum unrelated kahin se bhi..

I remember first time when i saw urmila running in a two piece bikini in tanha tanha on doordarshan, cable not being allowed in our home those days, watching her running in next to nothing on beach i remember the feeling that only a fourteen year boy can have. mom, dad and my sisters were shocked out of their senses to see her and ya i remembered Manisha Koirala in another titillating criminal song haha, prime time television was changing for better or for worse....(to be continued)

Nostalgia

Nostalgia, triggers a strange churning in our hearts. It comes in various colours, shapes, sizes and smells and invariably changes the way we see the world around us just like faint mountain sun coming out after a heavy downpour. Feeble, mild, it’s almost as if it wasn’t for real and yet your eyes can see vividly tiny droplets of water on leaves shining like small pearls, sunrays falling on your skin, giving an impression of seamlessly diluting your spirit and merging it with the surrounding. A slow diffusion process.

Strange, that after all these years of living away from dehra, i still have so much of affinity, sweet and bitter nostalgia and remembered almost all the by lanes and alleys of that beautiful valley town. I remember pedalling the school in cold mornings with numb hands with the sole purpose of reaching the school early and playing football with a tennis ball in our makeshift football ground, so much for carpe diem. I remember preparing the list of latest bollywood and pop songs to record in a blank T Series audio cassette, with sony cassettes reserved for popular English songs of those times, mostly by gaudy, popular boy bands. I played these songs every morning, at full volume, with school, studies, tuitions they were my only panacea, won’t be able to withstand them today.

Those evenings at Rajpur road, aimlessly following girls after tuitions. Those beautiful fascinating faces will be part of me forever, they are images that no guy just in his teens forgets. I am no mills and boon kinda writer nor marquez, so can’t emphasize what those faces mean to me. I guess i just have to leave it there, relying on a few aimless souls just like me to empathize.

I see my past in blue. Halka sa blue, just like mussorie , its just as if those mountains were witness to everything that happened and in their backdrop my life just moved, from lying in my school ground in bright afternoons to loitering in the recess with arms around ‘bestest’ friends, from watching shanti, junon and swabhimaan in succession to falling asleep dead tired only after this daily ritual, balla leke gali main nikal sonu monu ke ghar ja unko cricket ke liye bulane se lekar buaji ka mujhe gusse se bhaga dene tak. They were there, witnessing every moment of my life.

- to be continued