Down the memory lane

Attended the Golden Jubilee function of My School. The School has everything a 50 years old Public School should have. A great infrastructure - sprawling campus with nice foot ball fields, hockey, Basket ball and tennis courts, swimming pool and riding school.........You can see a great mix of modernism and traditionalism and a blend of spanking new buildings and blocks as old as the hills in the background. It has among its alumni, top brass from the defense services, bureaucrats, top professionals and corporate heads.

            A number of retired teachers in their 70s and 80s could be seen with clusters of ex-students around each.           The only thing perhaps lacking was 'alumni from different generations, in the same family'; that I feel is the true hall-mark of a great institution.

             Amaravathinagar came into being because of the dam over River Amravathi, and is now known all over the country because of the Sainik School.

          Everywhere, you could see boisterous back-slapping, laughter and light-hearted leg pulling. meeting after a long time, there were flashes of inputs on present and future, but mostly it was about past, past and past..... of memories sweet, salty and silly......

            Boys will be boys... you could sense an attempt to break away from the present and get back to the care free days...in a way it was the best of the both worlds, spending money like men yet behaving like school boys ! "

             If inanimate obects like tuning forks and pendulums can respond to a set frequency, what of the highly evolved human minds? Well, you could sense some kind resonance to a common frequency.

  

              My object of attending the function was mainly to meet my schoolmates, some of them I was meeting after 36 years or more.

             There were emotions, sentiments, the simple joy of being together, sharing a feeling of camaraderie, and I could see the look on some faces, "hi, I didn't know it would be such fun !

          Of course, there was an odd discordant note; some bitter memories did creep in. Some of us did hurt one another during our stay at the school, and some of us did carry our grudges home.It is always easier to meet than to depart gracefully.

      It is never too late to drop these extra baggages, and this was a great occassion to do so, drop them exactly where we picked it up from.

Now for some narcism