Two days of nostalgia. Triggered by two events - one absolutely unrelated and another that has carved for itself a permanent place in my life.
And my mind is a monkey, a baby monkey that cannot sit still but jumps from one thought to another, holding each strand of musing for less than a fraction of second, but interweaving them into a complex, beautiful story nonetheless.
Yesterday, DN said to me, like he does every other day, that he had misal pav for lunch. I decided to Google it up and came across a recipe for it on this blog site. As I scrolled down, a particular comment on the post caught my attention. Posted by ‘best chat in edison nj’ on November 30, 2011 at 1:32 AM, it read as follows: Bombay street food in nj [sic] the world’s largest open-air kitchen! The city is dotted with street carts selling a wide array of food and has an amazing culture of outdoor [sic] www.bombaytalkusa.com”
And the comment got me thinking of the US of A, and I remembered vividly how, at one point in my life, several years ago my only ambition in life was to get to America, the land of dreams. I remember wanting to desperately get into IIT because a) I wanted to get away from home and live by myself for a while and b) it was my passport to America. It was funny. At the time, the world comprised only India and America for me. Other nations did not exist, and even if they did, they held no significance for me.
I did get into IIT Madras in the late 90s and continued to cherish my dream of making it to America from there. When I won the Institute Blues Award, I knew I wanted to get to Harvard Business School. (I am smiling at myself as I write this.) But towards the end of my stay in IIT, I decided I had had enough of studying and that I now wanted a job. I did secure a job, a very high-paying one for the time, but threw in the towel in less than a year, joined a lower paying job where I remained confused and depressed for the better part of the two and a half years I spent employed there. But I also have the fondest memories of this job as I met KrA there and also made some very good friends there.
But I digress. My trip to New York in October-December 2005 was my first overseas trip, one that I cherish. I under-performed at work, but I was young and fearless enough at the time to explore Manhattan all by myself. I remember going to visit the Statue of Liberty and ganging up with a couple of Indian tourists, who gave me good company for the rest of the tour. I remember visiting Boston by bus to meet SG and Ani, my closest friends from IIT days, sitting by the banks of the Charles, taking in the wonderful views of HBS’ Baker Library.
The struggles of Indian immigrants in America were romanticized in books such as Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and Tanuja Desai Hidier’s Born Confused, books that I devoured, engulfed by the emotions portrayed in the novels.
I remember listening to Joey Lawrence’s Nothin’ My Love Can’t Fix and naively believing that America is the land where people have fun and frolic for a living.
And just like that, without any warning, London became the love of my life. Yearnings for a life in America were replaced brutally by a pining for London. I fulfilled a dream of taking KrA to America last May. We went up to Manhattan only to find it so polluted and filthy we wondered if we were in Mumbai. Since then I have moved on from London too. But it is startling how what was once the land of my dreams is no longer on the list of places I want to be in. As if I now know this was a dream I once had, but the Cosmos had other plans for me, and so I have other dreams now.
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The other big thing in my life that happened today was chatting with SG after ages, perhaps for the first time after I last met her in Boston all those years ago. She was my closest friend in college, and somehow after that we sort of drifted apart.
Chatting with her today brought back memories of how I struggled to cope with life in the real world after the enjoyable years at IIT. To me, my college years represented a period of time when I was determined, hardworking, alive and full of dreams, confident, and successful.
Life spiralled downwards after that. I kept thinking of my college days, wishing I could bring back to my life the qualities and attributes I had back then. I had a hard time moving on and I didn’t know if my batchmates were struggling as well. I found it harder to make new friends, I struggled with non-achievement. Time slipped by and as more years wore on, I kept sinking into the miserable feeling that I had achieved nothing of worth since I graduated from college.
KrA hit the nail on the head when he said I had grown to be afraid of hard work. I had paralyzed myself into inaction. My dreams had remained just that, intangible wisps of whims and fancies, fantastical castles in thin air with no foundations on the ground to support that.
Life changed for me ever since KrA gave me that epiphany. I am as relentless a dreamer as I used to be, even more so now perhaps, but I am also a bit of a doer now. I try to do more, oftentimes I give in to the temptation of laziness and inaction, but I do get back on my feet before it is too late.
And, as I was telling SG this morning, now when I think of my college days and my college mates, that part of my life and people from that era feel as if they belong somewhere in the distant past. And that I have moved on from them and there. And suddenly I can now look back on the past with peace and acceptance, no longer weighed down by sad memories or nostalgia. It is a relief to be free.
