The Haze of Time

In my previous blog I had written that I hardly ever pick up a physical book nowadays. Last week I decided to go through my bookcase to clear books that I thought I would never read again. As I was sorting a shelf, I noticed an old school textbook. It was a thin dust-covered book, tucked away amidst other tomes, and since it was a volume of short essays I thought it could provide some bedside reading. Anyway, that night I picked it up to read and lo and behold, the first thing I noticed were my handwritten notes, jotted down when I was probably younger than my son.

My generation, which precedes the digital age by quite a margin, have a few photographs, but no video or voice recordings, to remind oneself of how we looked and sounded when young. In short we have little to no digital memories! My parents did not maintain scrapbooks full of our dithering’s, drawings and squibbles, and due to the severe limitations of living space, no toys, clothes or other memorabilia were kept either. So to chance upon any personal belonging from that era was quite strange. Reading my scribbles from over three decades ago, started me thinking about the conditions and state of mind under which I would have written the same. It transported me back to my school and my classroom, and the trials and tribulations that at that age filled up my world.

My last years in school were a time of studying and examinations, unrelieved by play or relaxation. I do not have particularly good memories of those years, not because of any abuse or punishment. It was just that they were an endless parade of days filled with meaningless tests and exams. All I remember is trudging from school to tuitions and back again. Days spent cramming senseless facts and statistics that helped me not a bit, later in my chosen field. Those years were spent studying endlessly, with days and weeks of play, sunshine and happiness irretrievably lost due to the facile pressures of student life. Thankfully there was no pressure from my parents at all, and I can only imagine the hell those years would have been for classmates whose parents were "involved" with their studies and school.

I remembered chomping at the bit to leave the strictures of school life, but also overwhelmed by the thought of getting out into the wider unfettered College world. From the time that I could remember, my life had been a road that stretched straight ahead, with no forks or crossroads. Every year was a progression into the next school year, with each class unfolding either new subjects or greater depth in the same ones. The only thing that changed from year to year was my decreasing ability to cope with the different fields of study.

I remembered the trauma of my Board examinations, followed by the practical’s for Biology and Chemistry. And after that ......... nothing. The time between the Board examinations and the Final results draws a complete blank. I cannot remember anything. I was probably in mental stasis, with the contradictory emotions of excitement and fear, making it akin to floating away from the womb, the umbilical cord cut, never to know again the warmth of the familiar.

Every time we gain a new foothold on the steps of life, we concurrently lose something else. Whether it is our innocence, our paradigms, our friends or our comfort zones, life extracts its price.

I retraced the journey that I had embarked on since those school days, as an under-confident geeky slip of a boy, with neither the brains nor the brawn to take on the world. Any initial hint of bravura was crushed by the fiasco of my tenth grade results, the outcome of which was my inability to get admissions into any city college. At the time, the shame was almost unbearable, but my parents took it as stoically as they did all else. Not once did I feel their support falter, or hear them express even the hint of disappointment. All I recall are days spent in snaking queues for college admissions, with a growing sense of desperation as door after door was slammed shut in our faces.

In retrospect it was probably the best thing that happened. I tasted failure very early in life. I learnt the direct co-relationship between work and results, and that actions counted for more than words. Even more importantly I learned that failure was just an experience, and what mattered eventually was our reaction to it. Spending the next two years of my life in a community charitable school taught me to be humble, to learn to adapt to situations that one does not control, and the virtue of patience. All values that I frittered away during the next three years, in one of the most prestigious (in those days) college in Bombay. The freedom of college life, coupled with the absence of study or supervisory pressure made me complacent and lazy. From those years I learned that lessons not well learned are soon forgotten, and that freedom without responsibility is a one way street to failure.

Chancing upon my text book made me reflect on my journey since those days. In that cursive text from years gone by, I recognized the undeniable lineage of my current scribble. And just as the foundation for my handwriting was laid in those nascent days of my life, so was the character of the person I was meant to become.

The child truly is the father of the man.

P.S. Yup that is me in the photograph, and the glasses were the cheapest and toughest that my Dad could find in Bombay. They lasted through half my school years, and well into college!