A stroll down memory lane...

Prelude

It's such a wonderful feeling to reminisce about the good old college days. Many a times, we grope for the 'rewind' button to travel back to the time when we once wore a carefree-careless-care-a-damn attitude as college students and bunked our classes loitering around the city with weird hairdos, torn denim pants and other wacky stuff… Gone are those evergreen days… But if you ever get a chance to relive/recap those effervescent moments, sure you'd grab them with both hands. Wont you? Period.

Train to Paradise

Param made a rare visit to Madras and we (Hari, Param & Me) decided to pull the time machine and hit the ‘rewind’ button. We planned to visit our college! Well, I’d like to rephrase that… We planned to go to college, again!

Hari and myself (minus Alfy, Madhu and Satish) boarded the Suburban Electric Train (prominently known as EMU) at Chromepet, which actually was our routine mode of transport during our college days. We slipped into a tête-à-tête and after momentary time-lapse, train was fast approaching T.Nagar. Param was expected to join us. He was late. Gee, he had to sprint all the way to board the train, in the end he made it in the nick of time (as he always does). We (the trio) couldn't resist from getting on to the footboard of the train...

After all we've traveled in the footboard counting post after post, station after station during our college days… We had enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) every inch of railway tracks laid by the Englishmen. It was just a tribute to the endless footboard travels we had done all through our teens.

The moment we stepped on to the footboard against the strong gush of wind, we sensed a sudden rush of blood to the head!!! Kodambakkam passed in a jiffy...Presto, we alighted the moment train entered the Nungambakkam railway station (we normally do). Took the staircase to reach our college. I still remember those days when we were fresher at college, and we took the shelter out of the staircase to escape from being ragged.

And as we strolled the lean passage, we were there (we did miss the peanut shop on the way).

The Paradise

Loyola College! 'Man, things have changed. Just like our lives… ‘We thought to our self looking at the huge edifices cropped up recently, for they never existed when we did our bachelors. Some of the buildings were CUT and PASTE to different locations. Nevertheless the aura hadn't changed. The vintage Loyola was still intact. We criss-crossed our college in length and breadth. We went to the canteen, Betram hall, and the church, playground, meadows and hostel premises.

Although we never stayed at the hostel during our bachelor days, Param was a hosteler during his MBA days. But he was ousted though, within a year for all wrong reasons (No pun intended ). He did have a lot of hostel stories to recount and time flew by (and we were busy searching for ice-cold water that param was harping about)…

After a brief stint at the hostel we navigated our way back to the concrete-seat-bench just opposite to our class. And on the way, we had a steaming elachi tea…

Flooded with trees on the either side, the seating pavement is the perfect place for a soul in search of a whiff of fresh air. We fondly recollected an incident. A blast form the past!Our college elections held exactly at the same place. A no-hoper by the name 'Harikrishnan' won the election hands down… I could still remember that day…

And it was the same place where Hari and myself were waiting for Param, when he appeared for his arrear exam in mechanics paper. I shall take you through that scene… The exams were over. Param never expected us to present that day in the first place and the moment he figured it was us, he came rushing down from the third floor to meet us…I had never seen him so jubilant… And most importantly he passed the exam!

We had thousands of hundreds other instances to recollect. I took with me some memorabilia that I collected when we were in our college and we had fun scanning each and every one of them. It was thoroughly refreshing… To name a few…

• Terminal Question Papers
• Alfy's answer sheet (we normally take the q.paper and the answer paper with us after the exam… Alfy, remember ‘The one’ – From Metallica)
• Farewell Gift ( One hell-of-a-fortune for Vaidy)
• College Diaries
• Loyola Fast Food Bills

We then headed straight to clerks room…Near the display and sign boards… It was nostalgia again… Let me detail... Attendance was marked on a day-to-day basis against each student and it was displayed on the display boards. In case of any discrepancy (cases like you were marked absent when you were present et al), you can report to the admin and get things sorted out... The only time we ever had a look this display board, was when the Lack-of-attendance list was displayed. We knew for a fact our name would definitely figure in that list. But what we were really concerned about was the fine amount ... :-) And at times getting debarred for attendance was also on the cards… So with butterflies in the stomach we would show up at display board to check for our attendance… As luck would have it, we never got debarred for attendance…

The Paradise Lost

College days were heaven. It was so fast… It is gone... It has vanished so hurriedly…

We now had to press the ‘stop’ button and press ‘play’… Wish we could press the ‘pause’ button… And enjoy…

Epilogue

The entire evening was awesome. The only glitch, we missed the presence of 'Funky' Alfy, 'Silly' Anand and 'Innocent' Rajamani… Their presence would have been icing on the cake. At least next time around, we ALL should congregate at Loyola…

Signing off ambivalently...