Saturday, December 15, 2012

Leaving Roorkee

It's not a new thing at all. Eras end all the time and be it dinosaur, woolly mammoth or bronze age man, we all must dutifully trot out of the general scheme of things when our time comes.

Well,so leaving a place and a time is not the same as being asked to leave a planet. It's not like the best friends of today will not be your best friends when you're sixty and grey-haired and bad-tempered as a Bazooka ( more so if you have chosen the anti-social life of a pigeon-sniper). And Roorkee, the land that may have after all  been one of those lands like those in Enid Blyton's Far-away Tree, will always seem as ageless and timeless and pointless. Its ghosts will keep their vigil for evermore, one reason for this being that they have nothing else to do.

But you do know these pearls of wisdom better than than ever before. So many minor heartbreaks have come and gone that the stitches in your cardiac muscles do not relent so easily anymore. But still, it is there, palpable, pulsing the one long moment of heartbreak of realizing that this time will never ever return. You can see it happening before you in high definition - the things you took for granted dissolving into memory, friends and foes and faces dimming into shadows. But perhaps it will not be so easy for time or distance to undo that magic of having grown up with each other. Of having laughed and bickered and left the worst times at the mercy of coffee. Now that is a spell particularly hard to break.

There is no greater luxury than the company of those fellow dorks and dorkesses ( note: this is a re-edited post). The people who slid into your lives and changed just about everything for you.  And it is them who I miss the most as I sit up this sleepy afternoon, tapping words back into this old post. ( for sometimes, we must dive into the Pensieve and see what our memories are made up of).

Roorkee, where so many wonderful ideas took shape, has a place of honour down the Pensieve. You, dear blog, are in it too. The pine trees yonder the Thomsonian Marg, the fallen blossoms and the crickets in the canopy, that last final walk under the starry spectacle of a sky; all quite safe; tucked into memory-bottles-the kind you get at The Apothecary in Diagon Alley for a Knut.

Winter will soon fall in Roorkee. And the mists will descend down in their pearly, surreal beauty and mystery. This is not necessarily appreciated during those 8 am classes of the spring semester but trust me, it is a small price to pay for those wonderful feelings of nostalgia later . Do think about the pearly mists if life sends you to tropical Madagascar and just see what restorative magic it works on the the inside of your head. And do also recollect those icy, biting winds that would come swooping down on your ankles and toes and fingers and make question you the ethical grounds of having abandoned your warm and cosy bed in craven pursuit of some attendance.

Roorkee will grow onto you, long after you have left it. Even if you bullshit it for all public purposes, deep down within there is no way you can escape the charm of its myths and lore.

And so, now that it is time to leave the realm of the past and this blog-post, I can only wish that the spirits of Roorkee hover around for a little longer. And that the luck, wisdom and wonderful friendships it brought me stay with me for ever.

Spirits of Roorkee, Aloha!