Journeys

I want to take a picture today. And try to remember how perfect this one moment is. Two am. With Ilaiyaraja playing in the background. I’ve got hot water for a sore throat, chocolate, purple post its and a few hours of work left.

And a weeks worth of washing hanging in my room lending it the unique smell of surf excel. (Now you know it’s a good day, when rhyming goes my way).

Life is a learning process. Here you learn to test the limits of what you can do. Balancing your life is rather more difficult that balancing a line. Figuring out priorities and keeping track of it all. Ensuring you don’t lose yourself in passing waves.

Each of us here is on a different journey. An intensely personal and different one..

Three books a month. I need to read to keep myself sane. Talk to mom and dad once a day. Need to keep in touch with what is happening back home. One foot back home in Mylapore and another here on campus…

Everyone around me needs to get a foreign job. Staying up until 4 30 am, 5 30 am... by the time the term ends I’m up until 6 30 in the morning studying. Networking.

Making friends who will last a lifetime. Sipping chai at LKP till 4 am listening to stories and trading secrets by candlelight.

Dorm pizza dinners. Impromptu gathering of people who hate the mess food, ordering pizzas and sitting and watching friends. Promising not to cry at the end of season 10.

Staying awake at 2 am. Sleepy, tired but typing furiously in front of a fluorescent monitor. Promising not to lose touch with one of the few connects left with a past world. Blogging, writing long emails. Chatting on msn. Talking talking talking to keep myself sane.

Three submissions and exams from Monday. Fighting against time, deadlines and sleep to put up a play. Sleeping between acts during rehearsals. Reading HR case mat on stage when I don’t have lines to say. Giving up on fear and sleep and doing things I’ve never done before. Watching people go through thirty cigarettes over three days, to keep one awake.. to keep one buzzing.. For the sound of an audience standing up to applaud.

Four am coffee breaks with an entire exhausted class that has worked all night to create something close to magic. Posters, props, a small car and a very large sunglass made from thermocol. An Uma Thurman fashioned out of 6 meters of yellow cloth and a large shiny plastic knife.

Finishing HP6 on the very first day it released. Watching three movies a week. Every episode of Joey so far. Scrubs, Wonder years. Listening to classical Sudha Raghunath at 4 am and missing my mom so badly. Fighting over the last piece of murruku in a box. Missing home and everything about it.

Pictures up on walls. Struggling against strange schedules to stay together. Ticking off weekends. Ten Nine Eight... I’ll be home in Three. Escalating cell phone bills, arguments over who promised to call and who didn’t, birthdays spent away... and I miss you.

Dorm jijus who visit once a term... and take us all out for ice cream. This year, we have a dorm niece too. Who’s two. On a journey to make my child’s life better.

To be able to afford things I couldn’t earlier. To break out of a system. To go beyond coding. To get away from something. If I weren’t in IIMA I’d be married by now… overheard in a guys dorm.

On a journey to build cv points. Insight, Conflu, Chaos, CCC and Messcomm. To distill myself down to one page of bullet points and hope it exceeds expectations.

On a journey to score! Hand up in every class, trying to catch the Profs eye. To add value to a class discussion. To make my point. To do well... or simply, to survive and stay awake... even more so in a class where there are no points for the same.

On individual, diverse journeys. To make friends, meet someone, get a job, get a life, get somewhere, leave somewhere, be someone, or simply to be..