The reunion - II

We next paid a visit to the dorm I stayed in, D2. Vivek and me were the only representatives of D2.

With Sujit and Vivek Chandel

Even the tree in front of D2 had a hilarious story to tell, One of my dorm-mates, perhaps the shyest guy in the batch, was walking towards the dorm when some guys in the dorm started teasing him loudly about a girl. He became so embarrassed and disoriented that he walked straight into the tree in front of him!

We then paid a visit to the classroom which had so psyched me when I had first seen it. Each row is on a step so that siting on any chair was like sitting in the front row.For a veteran backbencher like me, this was not funny. Moreover the name of the student was written in front of the seat and Research Assistants sat at the back of the class armed with the seating plan making a note of how much each student participated in the class discussions. Gosh, this was something I had not bargained for! I learnt later that the weight for class participation was generally around 10% which I thought I could gamble with  so that was a big relief.

Sujit sitting on the seat where I had sat in class. 

I was parked in front of the blackboard. Vivek wrote the word 'praxis ' on the board, a word that had confused us for a whole term. I still don't know what exactly it means.

This was followed by a cricket match

and DJ night.

It was fun watching the middle aged folks trying to keep pace with the younger generation. I can report to you that the spirits (in more ways than one) of the former were willing and the flesh was not so weak, as evidenced by the rippling biceps of Balls (Rajeev Balasubramanyan) in a sleeveless T-shirt on a nippy Ahmedabad night.

We are basically an amalgam of hopes and memories. In his short story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Jorge Luis Borges writes:

One of the schools of Tlon goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory.

Here is the haunting story of a person who has lost his memory. In a post, Robert Krulwich says:

Take away your memories, the connective tissue of your life, and what's left? You may be breathing, but in the late stages of memory loss, you aren't really there any more. You have unraveled.

This trip was about renewing memories, some of which had dimmed but were given a new lease of life by revisiting familiar haunts. Passing the then computer lab brought a wry smile to my face as I recalled a project that had caused much heartburn. I thank my batch mates for giving me the opportunity to go back to the campus as also to the people who did the hard work of taking me to Ahmedabad - Jaya,  my brother-in-law and the home nurse.

Finally a brief mention about an aspect of campus architecture that had not registered in my consciousness when I was studying there. There are ramps everywhere so I could easily  move from one part of the campus to the other. The architect had designed the campus with sensitivity especially considering the fact that the Old campus was designed over 50 years ago. This cannot be said for most places in India.