Five Years Forever - II

This was also the time of great social churning. New friendships were being forged, some old ones forgotten and some still remained a possibility. Love was taking its own discreet course. New lovers were being discovered and promises given to older ones in distant cities were getting blurred. As if a group of persons had decided that it was the time to move on and don new avatars. It was a tumultuous period and excited heartbeats were palpable in the air. Then there were people who remained outside this churning. Our gang remained unaffected by this, at least in the first year, but later life and love took its own course for us. Great friendships were formed and some have stayed that way. Romance also burst into the scene with a bang but most faded away with time. Straight from school, not cynical enough to discard the notion of true love, most of us fell head over heels for someone only to realize that all is not rosy, especially not in romance.

The flip side of students forsaking classrooms and college was that even after five years we don’t know our batch mates. The camaraderie found among batch mates is missing. In our more cynical moments we even say that this notion of the “Class of ‘06” is nothing more than a myth, for we never were a “class”, in any sense of the word. As soon as most of us found alternative classrooms in movie halls, coffee shops and pubs, we remained stuck to those places with our own small groups. It was like a cocoon that ensured that some became very close to some but remained aloof from the rest. In spite of this, all was not gloomy. Thanks to cell phones, there existed among us a network which cut across these cocoons. I mean, you are really never more than ten taps on the keypad away from anyone. That is a comforting thing. So we always knew which the hottest movie in town was, where the café latte had more cream and which place played the best music to have beer. Then their were the birthday bashes where everyone from the movie addicts to the coffee drinkers to the beer guzzlers came together. If you ask me, I think we had managed to create a class even without attending college. This is one of the great achievements of our batch. Everyone knew what everyone was up to. As if there existed some invisible wire which kept us loosely huddled together.

First year was also the time to explore the city. If you stayed somewhere in Senapati Bapat road and had gone to MG road then this was a thing to brag about. Without bikes and for some, cars; grappling to come to terms with the auto fare, it was no mean feat to go to the other side of the town just to have few beers. Our group had a rule. No auto rides after they started charging “half return”, which depending on which part of the city you were, to the larger question of how lucky you were, could start anytime after 10 pm. We simply walked back from wherever we were. So there were midnight walks from the railway station, from numerous movies halls back to the PG.

Suddenly, someone in the college got jealous about the kind of fun we were having. Then the college did something very foolhardy. It hung the sword of an internal examination over us. History will say that it remains the only attempt (a very feeble one at that) taken by the college to enforce even a semblance of discipline in us. It was too late by then. The action had shifted and they had missed the script. We were beyond redemption, from their perspective that is. Our side of the story is that we were singing “redemption song” as Bob Marley sang it many decades ago. They even tried to sharpen this rusted, worn examination sword by saying that they will post the result to our homes. Soon a million ways were devised to ensure that the letter never reached its destination or to ensure (done with a lot of out of the world photocopy ideas) that the letter that did reach had the “right” sort of marks. Meaning neither too high nor too low. After all our parents know us!