cogitated thoughts

They’ve destroyed the park outside. The curtains are drawn, my window is closed and the park lies in ruins with the ghosts of the past, of a past that was full of children and their carefree, fun filled pursuits floating in the deadbeat, decaying, dusty atmosphere surrounding it. I’ve spent a large part of the last two years living a part of those children’s lives; cursing them half heartedly during exams, letting my gaze shift from time to time to the beautiful manifestations of innocence outside my window...running to the balcony to see if I can have a momentary conversation with just one of them…they break your hearts, these kids. You try talking to them and they’ll run away, and if they actually do talk to you some point of time…they just break your heart once again. Only this time it’s more like killing you in a real nice way. The Salinger way. That’s how beautifully symmetrical it is. They tell me that it shall be built again, other side of the hedge…other side of the apartment…but, it won’t be the same…it won’t be ‘the children outside my window’ anymore.

My first ever pre boards finished a couple of days back. As far as first pre boards go, they were fairly decent and that is all I shall say about them. Like Keerthi’s maxim states, write exams so that they can get over. Suddenly March seems just a few days away and people at school have generally started getting senti. The thing about Kendriya Vidyalayas is that everyone is from defense or ex defense background so, the maximum time that anyone would’ve been in a school is probably 4 years. But, exceptions arise in all cases and my school justifies that to the fullest. I’m probably the only one who’s been here for a miniscule 4 years. The others have been here since 1st standard, before which their siblings have been here since first standard and blah. Its been nice to see K.V’s developing and all though. For an education that is almost free, I think they serve us quite well. Its like everyone’s stuck in this major time warp, right out of a Spidey comic.

Everything involves a lot of paperwork, people don’t know that there are streams other than Science, they hand out these forms for parent teacher meetings and stuff that look like they would’ve been better off in an art gallery, all you’ve to do is to win a competition, any competition once and you can rest assured that they’ll send you for anything that is even remotely competitive for the rest of your school life, people distribute chocolates on their birthday, no fundoo lunches at some pseud place or anything…I guess stuff of this caliber. It’s kinda nice though. The simplicity of the people here can give you a goddamn heart attack sometimes while on the other hand, there are people who try to be ‘cool’..that can pretty much kill you too. But, everything said and done…it’s a nice place to be in. The nicest part is that people can be about a gazillion times different from you and you’ll still manage to have some of the nicest conversations with them. This one day, three of my teachers decided to take an off from school so in the two hours that we were free, my friends and talked about acads, current affairs, the U.S of A, regional movies, ghosts, death and finally when the school bell rang (it’s this rusted, ancient, railway track piece that the peon ‘rings’ atleast 6 minutes late periodically) we had just finished discussing God.

It was moi janamdin day before yesterday. Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my recently ‘electrostated’ head and precisely at that moment my folks sprung one of the greatest surprises in the history of all my birthdays by gifting me a splendid Digicam. An hour in the evening was spent in Blossoms. I must’ve spent half of my time trying to coax my brother into buying Tinkles, Amar Chitra Kathas and Marvels, who in turn spent half of his time trying to coax my mother (who if given a chance would’ve spent all her time in coaxing my father to please for heaven’s (and hard earned dough’s) sake to get the kids out of the place but unfortunately for her, he was going to join us only for the exquisite Chinese dinner that we later had), so all the coaxing wasn’t in vain because we generally ended up bringing at least 50 comics home.

Perfect days must have perfect endings and all you have to do to achieve that is to go home, lay out the three books and 50 comics that you bought from Blossoms on your bed and survey them with a motherly, affection filled look. Then, you must switch on your recently purchased 730i Pentium 4 computer, rush to ‘my documents’, open the file that says ‘salinger, j d- the uncollected works (22 ss)’ and read a story called ‘A Boy in France’. After you read the story once, then re read a coupla parts that you thought were amazingly swell; you must close your eyes and pray to God, telling him to please never let that plane crash.