Down memory aisle

Now that college is over, I ran out of excuses for not cleaning up my room. And that too, my Mom insisted on a clean sweep: I had to clear out all my old stuff, either throwing them out or packing them up in cartons for stowing away in some corner of the house.

Let me tell you something about myself. I hate throwing away stuff. Especially books and any sort of written material. So I had to dig through a tremendous amount of junk lying around in several cupboards, right from my old school days. It was long, dusty work, but it turned out to be rewarding in its own way.

It was as though I were revisiting every stage of my life in slow motion. There was this cute little book on stars and planets that had gotten me interested in astronomy in class three. There was the magnetic pencil box that I thought was cool in class five. There was a ton of fact and puzzle books which I'd been crazy about right uptil class ten, books like "World Famous Supernatural Mysteries" and "World Famous Bank Robberies", and a funny book of "Amazing Knowledge" from which I'd learnt stuff like what a spoonerism is. There were books on Indian fiction for children published by CBT that I'd loved at one point of time. There was a file full of my answer papers to english exams: I used to be quite good at writing essays and interpreting literature and all that jazz. Perhaps I'll sit and read through them one day these hols.

Then there was a serious stage of my life. The "Applied Physics" textbook from which I prepared for that ill-fated speech on lasers (refer the post "No Fear"). An organic chemistry notebook taught by that prof who made terrible jokes like "In Loyola college, there are a lot of students with AIDS." (shocked silence) "I mean, Arrears In Different Subjects." (groans all around) There were notebooks on Calculus that I'd kept because I could never remember any of the formulae after I entered college. There were editions of the school newsletter for which I'd been editor.

Then, of course, comes college. I found the entries to the creative writing contest when I'd been coordinator. There was a textbook on control systems, the most horrible course I've ever undergone. There was a ton of intermediate drafts of my report for my internship at Hyundai Motors. There was an autograph of the lead singer of Mother Jane, whom I'd interviewed for the campus magazine when they performed at Saarang.

It's like turning the pages of a book, and reading the story of your life: the good parts and the bad. It left me with a kind of bittersweet feeling... I've done a lot of good things in my life; but if only I'd learnt my lessons earlier than I did....

I threw away a lot of stuff, but I think I kept more than I threw away. I guess I'm still not ready to let go of some things. There were a lot of factors in my upbringing that have made me who I am today. They are lying in 5 neatly packed cartons stowed into an overhead rack in my room. I bet I'll glance up there now and then, and think about what a naive little bookworm I used to be. And tell myself that I still am one.

Cheers,
Prashanth.