Careful

A Truly Special Rendezvous

The Times of India; Date: 09-Jan-10

Year-end is usually that time of the year when one receives invitations for alumni meets. I, too, received one such invite from my engineering college and couldn't resist the temptation to sign up.

I started to think after the event - what motivated me to attend the alumni meet? The obvious answer is to meet classmates, professors, seniors, canteen staff, security staff and the juniors, too. But was it just that? After a bit of reflection, I found the answer: I had gone to meet myself.

It does sound a bit odd but I realised that the presence of all those people listed above had a little bit of me in all of them. Teachers who taught me perhaps knew much more about me than myself. They knew my weaknesses and strengths that they had discovered during my relationship with them as a student. Meeting them was like going to a temple and coming face to face with someone who can see through your personality. Yet you feel good about them.

Meeting them after long years makes you go through an ego trip and a guilt trip, all at the same time. You feel egoistic when you recollect how you had maybe managed to copy an assignment and had gotten away with it. Sharing that incident with them after so many years can be both a "reliving" and "relieving" experience.

I realised that my classmates were my ultimate search engines. I could mine a whole lot of memories, of them, us and me. When a dozen of us met and relived our salad days, small things about me - which I did not remember - were still fresh in their minds. They remembered my cleaning out their tiffin boxes and the time when I shared my notes with another who had lost his.

Meeting my seniors gave me the opportunity to meet myself a few years down the road. The change in physique and the colour of their hair notwithstanding, what struck me most was the glow on their faces when they met their classmates and professors. I guessed the same glow was on my face as well. Juniors, on the other hand, attracted every senior's attention by their sheer enthusiasm to be a part of a family reunion. Having been just a few years out of the institute and the nostalgia yet to surface, they seemed to enjoy watching their seniors having a good time. Meeting juniors was like coming face to face with a younger you. The envy that I'd felt earlier now turned to admiration.

Other than the people I met, even the place seemed to have retained a little bit of me. The institute equipment, benches, laboratories, walls, roads, trees and even the birds and pets reminded me that the space was an indelible part of my life. Though I had struggled to define resonance during my academic life, I could appreciate its meaning when I just closed my eyes for a few minutes and pressed the rewind button - I could feel the place throbbing with vibrations of my life. I could imagine my fellow alumni having a similar experience. So the alumni meet turned out to be an emotional, even spiritual experience, bringing old friends and acquaintances together, and most of all, putting me in touch with myself.