Of romances...

It's been a week into fourth sem, the most hectic semester for Elec junta in IITM, and the pain already shows. Work, I haven't seen in a lifetime seem stacked up for this semester. But its all started pretty well, and so I hope it goes that way too.

The point of this post was a documentation of how I viewed school-life, college-life romance. In school, romance was a taboo. Anyone in the vicinity of romance was an outcast. Being in Mylapore, among Chennai's more conservative regions, where a guy walking along with a girl on the road would get gossip-mongers going, romance was, and slightly still is a taboo. I remember our principal blasting a guy near the school canteen for have posed in a photo with his hand around a girl's shoulder. So, that was the intensity. College has been so different. Stuff like these are discussed more openly. Guys and girls on the roads is a regularity, and in the nights, its more of a phenomenon. I've seen a whale of both lives, and thought a bit of evaluation would get me somewhere.

School romances are pretty obvious puppy crushes. I had this friend who had 6 girlfriends in school life, and everytime swore "true love" to each one of them. Now, that's a total aberration. I'll be surprised if a guy or girl told me they had absolutely no crushes in school life, because its such a natural thing, a part of growing up. Only one girl's told me she had no crush all her school life, and I had all the reason in the world to believe her, but then, there are exceptions. But, many know that school crushes seldom don't continue into real domain. School is a playground. You may score centuries as a batsman, but then that makes you a hero in cricket, out of it, you may be a nobody. You may piss in your pants if you saw a snake sneaking around the dressing room. School crushes are probably moments which make you look back at how stupid you were in certain occasions, at times to garner that certain somebody's attention, the funny things you did, certain stuff laugh-worthy, certain embarassing, everything!

When you walk into college, everyone tells you your out of school, your a big man now, into your own life, you have to lead by yourself and all. But to hell with it, everyone is so damn protected in college life also. The only serious problems you face here are a W in a course for insufficient attendance, or a failure in a quiz. Worst case, you are suspended from hostel for ragging, and you become a day scholar. Drugs, booze probably, but then those are in one's hands to control or not. But, when one gets into college, the person develops this confidence as a personality, and he/she first tries it out on a person of the opposite sex. Again attraction is inevitable, but how serious you are about stuff is what is in your hands. The upper-middle class bred on Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and other colourful campus romance movies, sadly take too much of a message from these movies. In my opinion, college romance is slightly more dangerous than even puppy romance. Puppy romances come without an expectation, with not too much of an importance given to them, while college romances are just the opposite. People, now "grown up", take up "responsibilities" when it comes to campus romance, and it gets them entangled into a never-ending thing here. The worst part comes when you actually got to move on. People swear about maintaining long-distance relationships, but then stuff break up in a month or two. People find better partners, again feel "grown up", and start all the way again. Sometimes, campus romance pushes past all this to get into a serious manner, but then again, it's not everyday that you turn a Shah Rukh Khan and go get your Kajol from somewhere in deep Timbuktu. There is no need to presume the author has been too loyal to his words either! But yeah, I personally do feel that, people should actually give a lot of thought to stuff like romance, considering you are hardly between 18 and 22, not good enough to even decide which career you are going to be serious about, when you decide on who your partner should be.

In earlier days, the concept was different. Child marriages happened, and when the children grew up, and the first crushes turned out to be the spouse, with whom marital bliss already existed. But then the certain evils associated with this concept made it a concept to do away with. This is a topic I gave a lot of thought into before writing about, and I have found myself pretty convinced with the above conclusions. This is also a dedication to someone I knew, someone I must apologize to, in spite of trying to grind in the fact that I was doing the right thing.

P.S: If you haven't checked Saarang 2010's teaser out, do check it out. It's friggin' awesome! :)