Nostalgia

1. That 'near to run' walk from home to school in record time each morning that ensured we reached on time everyday inspite of starting late. The myriad teenage conversations along the way.

2. Rushing down to play cricket or spend time with building friends, true friendships for life. Everyone now spread all around getting together once in a long while and laughing uproariously at the same jokes all over again.

3. Being lucky enough to grow up with my paternal grandmother and feeling the love she had for us; the way it manifested itself in her actions.

4. Spending hours browsing / rummaging through the multitude of books at Kings Library and then selecting the 2 or 3 most wanted to rent for reading. Running through them at breakneck speed and then repeating the above process all over again.

5. Being to able to bowl overarm for hours on end at a reasonably fast clip in the building compound. Playing tennis ball 'seal' matches with neighboring apartment building teams where the losing team forfeited the tennis ball got by them.

6. The feeling of anticipation while walking for Maths / Science or Hindi / Marathi tuitions depending on what was going to happen that day. As an aside, being the only boy in a batch full of girls at Hindi / Marathi tuitions; feeling very uncomfortable about that.

7. Travelling to Lamington Road with Dad to his place of work and getting special treatment from all his colleagues and friends. And a great lunch to follow with Dad.

8. That delicious tangyness of mom's dry aloo preparation (called batatya wagh in Konkani) and the explosion of flavours in the aftertaste. And so many other such dishes of her and my grandmother's making.

9. Walking into Bhavan's College on the first day for FYJC as part of a large group of over 25 Franciscans believing safety is in numbers from the 'ragging' phenomenon and gratified knowing the belief was correct. Enjoying the freedom that a college provides. Experiences of bunking, also physics and biology practicals, hanging around in the college campus.

10. Navratri nights in our building complex learning, enjoying and mastering the Garba steps; something we looked forward to every year. Dancing away till the wee hours with the same gusto as we had begun.

11. Getting a rick (alone) from college to Uncle's Kitchen (a small but well known local Chinese joint) and splurging on delicious Chinese food! Yes, really!

12. Going to NIIT Borivali three days a week for the GNIIT course and discovering that I did have a head for computer programming after all. The thrill of writing hundreds of lines of code and running it without any errors.

13. Hours spent discussing all and sundry with my friends in the college campus and dreaming about the future.

14. Having the capacity to devour surprising quantities of food with no apparent ill effects; being a welcome guest at my best friend's house and eating the most delicious non-vegetarian food.

15. Sunday mornings spent going through NCC drills in college; loving and hating it at the same time for the extremes of joy and pain it brought me.

16. The butterflies in my tummy as I first walked into a room for my first ever Group Discussion as part of the MBA program selection process and seeing other candidates and their aggression. Wondering if I would ever make the cut.

17. The days (and sometimes nights) spent on campus working hard towards earning that MBA degree; learning life lessons along the way and making lifelong friends inadvertently.

18. The first job and going through the shock of learning everything afresh and unlearning some of what I'd learnt through my school and college years. Late nights spent at work that went by in a flash in the company of some exceptional colleagues the likes of whom that it is still difficult to match.

Nostalgia is a strange mix of reliving happy memories of the past and missing them in the present. These and many others like them live on in my mind and from time to time bring on a wave of remembrances looked upon fondly and with wistfulness of those days never to come back.