4 years....enough for a lifetime?

Sitting down to pack 4 years into 4 cartons I wondered if it was all that it was. 4 years, 4 cartons of luggage and memories lasting a lifetime. For the many of us life had not begun until we left home with dreams in our eyes and a bag full of necessities to an unknown place to live among unknown people and just when life started making sense and the “unknown” started feeling like home, it is time to move; again ; to keep in motion the journey called life. Let me not sugarcoat this and call it the “best days of my life” no, how can one objectively categorise these four years into good/bad or their superlative degrees? These days have been marked with far more myriad events and emotions than just good/bad. They have been tough as they could have been. So tough that sometimes (read very often) you feel like leaving everything behind and running away into the wilderness never to be found again. But hey! You made it…through the mud pits and the long dreary tunnel you made it. This right now is your Shawshank Redemption moment. The days have also been fun. The most fun you have had in your life. 4 am parties and unlimited intoxicated bullshitting around. You’ve made friends. Great ones. Like the Marauders type good friends. And you might also become the god parents to their children in the future! And you have also made enemies, but let’s not go there today. And then you might have fallen in love, for some once, for others multiple times, so many that the people around you lost count, and for some of us our love lives in these 4 years have been akin to an highly anticipated episode of the “Keeping up with the Kardashians”. But through all of this, these four years have been what they could have been. Like our parents before us, like the dinner table conversations sometimes they begin with, “During college, once….” These are our stories, our tales, our fables for our children and for theirs and no matter how many times we complained, how many times we just wanted out, how do you begin to separate these 4 years from your existence? You cannot and you will not want to, because this is a part of your identity. A part of you!! What you made of these years is yours for eternity! Hence congrats mate! We were in this together!! 

Grown Up?

"Nobody feels like an adult. It's the world's dirty secret"- Liberal Arts

It's the end of an era, like they proverbially say. I mean college is getting over, you are graduating in a month, you have a job in your hand and suddenly everybody expects you to behave a certain way. A certain code of conduct needs to be followed and deferring from it can, to put it subtly, land you in soup. Technically when you entered college you were an adult in the proper legal sense but now that you at the end of it, you are the "adult" version of an "adult. *This should make absolute sense! like duh!!* Your Facebook newsfeed is suddenly a repository of wedding pictures and baby pictures. Your friends and immediate seniors are getting married and having babies and there you are in your superman shorts and 1st semester college tee, a packet of Lay's Magic masala as your saving grace, 3 am in the morning, tired but not sleeping because it ain't worth sleeping until you want to gouge your eyeballs out, searching for the lastest episode of Flash or if Charlie Cox has a girlfriend and intermittently wondering if you will ever "grow up". I mean deep down within you are still that 15 year old, who has no clue exactly what is happening but then you surely want to be Elon Musk's competitor in the space business and have a lunch date with Scarlett Johansson, but you have no idea how. Like a well loved character in a much watched web series asks- how do you ever know when you grow up?? Like how do you know that the things you decide have to be absolute? Suddenly all your decisions are yours and the privilege of the safety net just ceases to exist! Sometimes it appears that all the "adults" in the world aren't adults per se. You never "grow up". You just accumulate experiences and like that code you ran the other day and it showed compilation errors, you start learning newer ways to debug it and run the program better in the near future... Well, all being said and done, I believe it's our time to enter the "real" world! All aboard! And God Speed!!