28 Nov To 10-11-12

I started with the thought that the Beginning and the End of this post are probably gonna be one of the toughest ones for me to write, as it is difficult to express extreme emotions especially by me who does not have a good pool of words to chose from. But then it is also very difficult for an expressive like me to describe few of the most memorable days of my life in such small posts. So I decided to do this in parts. Since I have to begin somewhere, I'll start with my ticket booking for convocation. The whole excitement began when the dates for convocation were announced. It was scheduled for the first Saturday of November and I started counting the number of days left to meet my buddies and juniors, gults and mechwing, pclub and baja. Slowly began the discussions with friends about how they are going to travel and who all are going to travel together. Finally my travel plan was set. I was going to take a flight from Delhi on Thursday to Bangalore, train from there to Mangalore with friends, attend convocation on Saturday, and Sunday was return flight from Mangalore to Delhi, with a change point at Mumbai. Few people probably wished that the convocation be held the next week so that Diwali holidays could be used well and God heard them. The convocation got postponed by a week, rumored reasons were the unavailability of the chief guest, about whom, I am sure, no one was bothered. 3 flight tickets cancelled 3.6k cancellation charges. Planning started again. I checked my training schedule and my intuition told me that the Sunday after my convocation would be declared working and the following Monday would be declared a holiday as there were three holidays following, on the occasion of Diwali. There were discussions again but my plan didn't change much. I was still taking the flight to Bangalore and then train to college. But I wasn't coming back to Delhi from college.I decided to give a surprise at home and so got a ticket booked for a bus to Hyderabad.

I wanted to buy something for mom n dad from my salary. After considering lot of options and taking a lot of suggestions I finally went on with the standard "mummy pappa ke liye Ghadi" and bought watches for both of them. I bought sweets for pals whom I was going to meet at college, finished up work at the office, informed that I would be on leave for next four days and packed everything on Wednesday night. The flight departure on Thursday morning was delayed by about 40 minutes for reasons I didn't know. I reached Bangalore at about 2, met Shanthi and along with her parents and elder sister we went to her office. We had lunch at the colorful cafeteria on the ground floor of her office building. We kept talking about all different things, from IT buildings in Bangalore to the malls here in Gurgaon. From there we went to the magnificent ISKCON temple. We spent some time there, then came back to hotel, vacated their room and headed to the railway station where Saketh's father was waiting for us. It seems Shanthi had a record of reaching at the nick of time. We let the legacy continue. For me it was fun to go out of the station with her to get something packed for dinner, all the while teasing her that I will make her miss the train. Her phone kept ringing. People were calling to find out what she was doing when the train was about to come. We did come back in time. I met Varshini, Meenal, Aparna and Santosh. I found Das and Rao were in the same train. Abhinav Kartikeya and a lot of other tricalites were also in the same train. It was only after I got into the train that I realised that the train was full of NITKians. Sarvesh Gabbar Kamath Vijay SrikanthNayak and so many others. I had no control over my voice box. My excitement was at peaks. Only I know how much I enjoyed the journey that night. The Idli Dosa Sambar CurdRice. Moving between S10 and S4. Frustrated TTs. Mysore railway station. Conversations about new times with old friends and old times with new friends. I dozed off, cherishing the memories of those times and thinking about the times to come, at some unknown time after 2 in the night.

Cheers

Aditya