Return to Innocence...

"The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past" - Robertson Davies, A Voice from the Attic

Someone once said ’’Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be’’ . In today’s supersonic age, hardly do we ever get to sit back and think about our past - Memory lane has become a one-way tunnel. But once in a while something happens which turns our world upside down, forces us to retrospect and have a relook at how we are doing in life. And today, i am in one of "those moods". There is so much that has to be said so much so that a start has to be made...Today i shall do it..

I still remember...

....how as a kid, I used to despise movies and spend most of the time hiding behind chairs more so during the fight scenes.

....the time my standard 4 class teacher Ms. June Ann Lawless left for good to Australia and I wept for days continuously - even wrote lines and lines in every notebook i could lay my hands proclaiming " I love you Miss"

....parts of my early childhood when i used to be that extra-careful kid never walking down the stairs of our house but simply sitting and skidding down each one of them to avoid getting hurt.

....my first drawing competition when after days and days of wonderful practice mastering the Air India Maharaja under the tutelage of my aunt, on D-Day i went and drew bananas and mice :-)

....the day when mid-term tests got over at 4 pm and we used to play cricket with our pads and Question papers rolled as balls till it was 7 - by which time our rickshaw wala would give up on us and leave..and how we chased him for 5 kms (no exaggeration) and boarded it just before it reached our homes whilst anxious Paatti waited at the doorsteps...

....how as a class monitor i used to accept bribes from "talkative students" for not reporting them to the teachers (Kishore, I swear am ashamed of this but i jes wish u wud stop reminding me about it when we meet even today)

....how towards std 4 or 5, the horrible drawing exams became the most unendurable tortures - the closest I have ever come to failing in any test in my student life

....the summer cricket camps when i had to wake up at 6 am, take a bath, change into whites, chug along my kits and rush off to Bishop Heber where we went through drills and routines worse than Stalag-17

....L&D periods when i used to ask those supposedly innocuous questions to Miss Uma Maheshwari regarding the foul language in The Merchant of Venice.

....my first crush...sigh...and how i used to try foolish stunts like hitting a six off every ball whenever she passed us on her way to Carnatic music classes.

....the pride with which I used to tell my friends' parents that i never went to any tution (till my std: 12 atleast..Thanks Ma n Pa for believing in me and my abilities)

....that one mad week, almost a month after buying my first bicycle, when i had a series of accidents considering i had never once hurt myself while learning it.

....the various whacky names Shakir and I used to give our quiz team - Sample this.. GGFL - Good Guys Finish Last (so that we had an excuse in case we didn't win...but then nobody even bothered to ask us to expand and explain..Dumb ol' Trichy)

....each and every single ambition I've had in my early childhood...right from becoming a bus conductor to a tennis star like Becker to the guy wielding the lathi at a cinema theatre..

So much more but all that for another rainy evening....