Isolated Inkblots

Already been 30 days in campus after the summer hiatus. Time, it seems has a penchant for pacing up when you really don't want it to. So many moments, each having a different story to tell, and yet clustered together, indifferentiable as an inkblot connected to other inkblots tracing a path. Curvy at times, it transgresses your imagination, takes you to places you never thought you would go, connects you with people of the weirdest kind - until - weird becomes familiar, more so when you look at the mirror.

To try to find meaning in this trail of dots, to see if it connects - a futile exercise in itself as I see it - except - of course,  when it comes to graduation commencement speeches - to inspire, to hold in awe, to entertain the bright systemic robots treading the tested track- hindsight is always right! Ain't it? Just in case, you begin to develop some hard feelings, I really love the Macbook!!!

And on the road that stretched till black asphalt blended into orange and red, we rode - 3 guzzlers and a lass - humoring our appetite to natures bounty disowned by mortal men. Basking under the rays of the twilight sun amidst the fields rendered in green, yellow and brown. The weeds inspired us. 4 kids playing on the Merry-Go-'round - laughter, fun and innocence. One of them looked like the kid in my mother's album. The scallywags with me thought just the same about the other kids.

There are some dots that are better left unconnected.

A New Beginning

808 days ago, I had made my my last blog entry. It was a crossword sprinkled with keywords dedicated to my undergrad days. It has been a long time and I have moved on since then. Now at a different place, with new friends, different tasks and new perspectives. Nevertheless, when I scan through my old blogs, reminiscences of those beautiful-yet-not-so-innocent days flash across my mind.

Time was not a luxury then. We had truck-loads of it - be it for the movie-every-night, football-every-evening, catnap-every-afternoon or breakfast-every-morning. And that was not it. There was even more time for cycling around the beaches shoring Trivandrum, playing pranks on crushe(s), gorging mouthwatering uzhunnu vadas in heavily subsidized canteens of space organizations, rambling away on nonsensical themes with sensible philosopher friends, playing AOE for 3 hours pre-midnight and CS for 3 hours post-midnight - rest assured all the time that waking up well into the first hour of hydraulics lecture at 9 AM wouldn't do much harm as long as you paid your dues in Lemon Sodas & Parippu Vadas to the proficient-proxy-professionals.

And like all good things, those days too faded away. Armed with an engineering degree and disarmed of leisure, love and luck, I walked into a firm located a thousand miles away from home barely a month after graduation. Unlucky I was of not being posted at the firm's Bangalore office initially - I missed my family, my fulsome-fish-food and friends - half of them who were posted in the 'party city'. Leisure was unknown, especially in my first year into the job, working hard to cover up for missed-but-must-know concepts of engineering professed but not pondered upon. That was the slog period. Eventually, things brightened up, I loved my work. Naval Architecture fascinated me. To design ships of steel that sailed seamlessly across the seas were as much an art as science. Fairing the lines of her hull to sail with the least resistance & adequate stability, sizing her girders & stiffeners for strength, engineering her machinery & propulsion systems was all what I loved to do. It was so intense, involving and beautiful. And in between I got my stint in Bangalore too :) Everything was going nice. But I terribly missed my blog. My pals used to pen their thoughts once in a while, to some of which I commented. But that was it. My penchant to write was never addressed, thoughts were suppressed, feelings bottled up. And then, I took a break - for good.

Quit my job and joined a b-school in the 'City of Nawabs'. It is nice to be back to school. The lush green campus, evening football games, the insti-parties flooded with drinks, the rock band, the midnight noodles and the beautiful girls - not a bad trade-off :)

And here is where I resume my lost thread. I thought I would start it as a new blog. Hope you, my friends, will enjoy it. So long...