Twenty one years. Hyderabad has fed me. I have been at this same place that same amount of time. I have seen Hindus and Muslims fight around the corner at old city every week. I have witnessed flyovers collapse. Telugu families in my neighborhood, which migrated from Andhra region, always made of my Urdu mixed Telugu. I have been in love and out of it. Or I am still stuck to it, I'm not sure. I have hated someone and stopped. I was hated and still am. I tried being what I wanted to be. I have tried to make friends. I have tried to meet deadlines. I have worked my way to the top of the ladder and just before I reached the peak, toppled and fell. I have been the victim of others' hate, pride and ignorance. And of course, of Bruteforce. They threw stones at me. They made fun of my company. They hated me for saying the right stuff. They hated me for taking my own stance. At the end of it all, what bugs me the most is the fact that they'd mention me as "Oh he is just someone I know from Undergrad school".
The last four years of these twenty one years have been very memorable. The kind of memorabilia you would never miss out on when you are old and you are mulling. Albeit, I can remember the first day of college very vividly, I seem to be loosing track of time when it comes to looking back at the stuff that made me what I am today. Truly cherishing moments were those when we came out with M'06. I was just a beginner at designing and I couldn't write half as good as a fourth grade could. They, my seniors, taught me. They made me realise that if I wanted to express myself then I should not look into the mirror but look into my heart. They opened my eyes to a world that I never knew existed. They corrected me with a slap on my head everytime I made a mistake. I respected them for that. I admired them and to a certain point I idolised them. Then came the day, when they had to leave. I despised the day. I cribbed about that day for a long time.
Time passed by. Winter came after autumn. Life seemed weary. I saw my juniors crib about the smallest of the things. I laughed at them, in public. I taught them that life is meant to go on. They listened to me in awe. Ironically, I have become the senior who will not be seen in the college from next semester. The time of the year has come and passed, when anonymous professors from other colleges question your abilities and test what you have learnt in the last four years. I don't want to be here though. I want to go back. I want to relive them all. The happy times and the sad times. I want to slap the girl(TDP) of my class who thought I had a crush on her and told everybody that I proposed her. I want to pick up the chocolate wrapper I threw in the department corridor and put it in the dust bin. I want to hug the trees under the shades of which I revised that one last bit of theory question that appeared in the question paper. I want to keep the rocks in which I sat chatting my time away, devoid of thirst of time testing scales. I want to watch a movie together with all my friends. I want to end feuds and cold wars which exist in groups of friends and well wishers. But time is always a constraint. It is stopping me now like it always did whilst trying to go back and correct my mistakes. Make myself a fool by getting trapped in false love. And deserving the very worst treatment there is.
So, I bid farewell. To this college. To the walls, to the cafeteria, to the stairs, to the basketball court to the D Block where we have mirrors in washrooms(Does your college have one? Ha Ha. It does? Still. Ha ha!) and to my favorite part of the college, the rocks in front of B Block.
Every student will be here. At the same point where I am right now. Nostalgia is not the right word to describe my feelings. It it something else. Something that will grip your happiness and at the same time, makes you feel good about it. A heightened sense of emotion and satisfaction. Graduation day if not far away. Four years of my engineering are flashing in front og my eyes as I type. Not every group of friends stick till the end. Not every student who passes in distinction does something useful with the subject. Not every student who scored the highest in Physics or similar subjects, give an acknowledgment speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony.
There are people waiting for you out there, ready to clutch your throat to get their work done. Some would jsut pay peanuts for the breakthrough research you do for them. Manners is excessively rated to the extent that if you would sneeze and wipe your nose, people are scandalized. The way you deal with them depends on your attitude with which you graduate.
I habe tons of funny incidents that will make you roll on the floor laughing and some that will make you shed a tear or two. But I'll let you readers learnt it on your own and baby! At terpsikure, you make your own memories!
At the end of it all and at the risk of sounding cliched, I'd simply sum up my engineering life in one line.
"Engineering was fun man!"
