'And as we wind on down the road '-Led Zeppelin

After about a couple of couple of couple of months i am writing here to lay to rest the myths that were circulating of my blog's death (so what if i started them,they are myths all the same). Its been a (any adjective you can think of comes here) few months, what with me going to interviews, followed by heartbreak of not getting through them, followed by joy of getting through some of them, followed by workaholic times with project report submission(word of advice, don't start work on the project two days before submission, give yourself at least four days. Anything beyond 5 days and you are wasting precious time) and then extreme sorrow of leaving behind a place that has come to be your home for 4 years. And that is what i am gonna talk bout. My 4 years in college.

I can still remember my first day, when my dad had told me how the next 4 years would get over before i knew it, and boy was he right. Now that i have come to the end of it all, i realize how 4 years have gone by. How what was to me a barren piece of land in the middle of nowhere on highway number who-gives-a-damn leading to who-the-hell-cares land had turned into a beautiful place i called my home. Not because of praise-be-the-lord miracle nor because of some crazy election drive(even politicians don't give a crap, well actually that's kinda expected) but because of the people who shared the place with me, people with whom i came to identify a new phase of my life, people with whom i know i shall share a special bond for the rest of my life(people who eat crap together share such a bond). The best part of studying in a national institute is the variety of people u get to meet. I can safely say that i have spent the last 4 years with some of the brightest minds in the country(and that's not counting the guys on dope).

Today the impression i have of my college is drastically different from what it was four years ago, and very obviously that has nothing got to do with academics. But in every other way these four years are largely responsible for making me the man i am today. For instance i switched from Indian Standard Time to Dutch National Time(inspired by Eurotrip, true story), i stopped studying a week before the exams, moving on from 4 days, to the weekend before to the morning of the exam during my final sem. I went from half a cup of weak coffee a day to three cups of black coffee after i brushed my teeth and as many cups in the day as i could. I went from first-to-arrive first-bencher to rarely-arriving-last-bencher. I went from the being the teacher's pet to the teacher's worst nightmare ever in which the pet bites off her head and then runs away with it. Anyone reading this must think college ruined my life, but those thinking so do not know that the biggest lesson and probably the most important lesson that this place has taught me is to live on my own, to make my own decisions and to realize that those decisions can actually bite me in the ass, and that pain does not manifest immediately when my mind is 'bright'. And all this only after my second year into college (my first year got lost in JEE books).

To the friends i made over there i owe some of the best memories of my life. My wing-mates, my department mates, my juniors, my seniors and my teachers(trust me, messing with a teacher's head can be a wonderful memory). Those late night table tennis matches during exams, the gossip sessions in Diamond 14 which got relocated to Emerald 36, the drunken fiestas (you know who i am talking about), the walking into class half an hour late without even looking at the teacher, sitting in the last bench messaging or solving crosswords or solving T.I.M.E papers or throwing chalk bits or sleeping or all of the above, those quizzes and those near misses(or as george carlin says near hits) and so so much more, events that littered the last four years of my life, events that i can never forget, events that put a smile on my face,events that brought a tear to the eye, overall events that reminded me that every single moment i spent over there will become memories for a lifetime.

Now as i leave this place, the empty corridors remind me that it will never be the same, and as we move on and we meet new people along the way, the mind shall always come back to those 4 years ,in that barren land on highway number who-gives-a-damn going to who-gives-a-crap land, that i owe my life to. Thank you for everything.