From an outsider's eyes

One thing I realized over the last month is that, how much so ever you try to downplay the emotions at a juncture of your life where a drastic change is about to happen, you can't really avoid it when it hits you. I've been trying to be all cool about end of college and all that, but when you enter college as technically an alumnus, it hits you hard. It's hardly been a week since I formally vacated insti, but when I walked in today, my hostel room was locked by the hostel management, the place where we usually play cricket was occupied by a different gang, Prasad and Sudharshan had vacated their rooms, Malliks was vacating in a week, the department was empty, the feeling was plain ominous.

I still remember my first day in insti. That started off with orientation at SAC, followed by lunch at SGR(vegetarian mess which once existed in Ganga hostel) with those who would become my best friends over the next four years. That night, the first night I spent in insti, I walked away from the mess towards the side road connecting Ganga and Pampa, I even remembered the song that was on the radio, it was Chinnamma Chilakkamma (the ARR song from Meenaxi which was rehashed into the Tamil film Sakkarakatti), and I walked upto my room in the second floor of Pampa hostel, and put the lights off at 9am. It wasn't because I was tired, it was because I was terrified of staying at this new place, with all alien faces, and obviously the fears that had been spread around about ragging sessions.

What followed was a roller-coaster of five years. The next couple of days are obviously hazy, considering its been five years, but then it contained our first CCD trip, our discovery of the route from hostel zone to CRC via the HSB, where we were then allowed to push cycles through the side of CLT, our first ragging sessions, naming sessions, first cricket practice and a lot of other stuff. Something which I think must be true with not only me, but with everyone else is that though our experiences across five years were a lot, our experiences in our first year must've been a huge learning curve. A lot of things I saw in my first year, just blew me away. For someone who was extremely attached to his school, and was very hesitant about the first few days in college, I was in love with the place at the end of my first year.

A lot of memorable events happened across my five years at IITM, people came, people went, there were people who got close, there were the back-stabbers, there were the ones who fought and then apologized, there were the ones who fought and then just backslapped like nothing happened, there were the ones who were doing some fantastic work, there were the ones  who were killing time, there was the first love and the rejection, there was the first short film, and the second, and the third, and the fourth too, there were the people whose importance I realized very late in my five years that I would wish to spend an extra couple of years so that they got the importance they deserved from me, there were the people whose memories with me are reminders of the fact that I shouldn't really let myself get screwed up just because someone else isn't happy with the way I am, there was this, there was that, there was a lot! If I had to objectively rate my years at IITM, my fifth year was the best, understandably so since responsibilities are much lesser in your final year. There are just too many stuff coming to mind that my clear mind is now just a muddled collage of too many over-sized images. Like below. There is unfinished business of stuff I started in IITM, things I hope I will be able to finish successfully, or maybe not, but I'll be ever thankful to IITM for everything it gave me.