Atonement

I was travelling across the misty fields of water lotuses. wandering with random throughts that have been an inner world to a chaotic self, how else I would have taken my life just one year back. Amused, dazed, phlegmatic of almost everything. In a world which was an illusion for close to 21 years.

And then one friday night, changed everything.

Teleporting my self to 24th February 2011, I had worries of a broken friendship, a halted relationship. If that morning someone would have asked how do I feel, I would
have surely said "exhausted". With the dipping sun, the mist in my life settled.. my boat of a solitary traveller shored into a new land. A land where the first step seemed a million milestones far, where looking at a stranger with a hope of security defined insignificance. A place of knowledge or another animal farm right out from the unspoken words of Orwell's novel.

As I reached far across my hometown leaving a handful of folks who cared, for an education which promised to change me into anything but ordinary. for better or for worse is a question in a limbo, that night I lay watching the ceiling of my hostel room for as many number of hours as I cant count. Time seemed endless, life seemed empty, like a washed slate awaiting scribbles...

"Hey Hi, which room are you??"

That's how a sunny warm morning started, My first friend.. My neighbour..

Never had been room numbers so significant as the first few days of a hostel life. with time the jig started. The fight...of assignments, pre-reads, marks, friendship,
groups, partying, late nights, emotions and the entire of everything that one wants to experience on a road to freedom for the last time in his life. 100 days, 300 hours of sleep, 500 assignments, tests, grades, competitions; suddenly the meaning of life went simpler. No more moments were the memories of a happening past,no more they were of coping up, they were of survival, right in the middle of everything the animal farm nurtured itself into utopia. A utopia I call my second home; this very world, changed. Anything outside the four walls was a simile to an alien land and right here, withing the constructs of marketing strategies and financial ratios did I find comfort.

My comfort of great friendship, my comfort of support, of securities. My comfort of achievements, of goals I would have never dared dreaming, my comfort of care, of affection, my comfort of a second family where dreams were cherished, madness was rejoiced, anger was beheld, a comfort where all illusions broke lose.

No, Life did not stop being what it used to be, it had all its share, betrayal, unfaithful frindships, sadness, tears. Like everybody's from distress to glory this college life had all of it. but in all those mishappenings it did teach how to burn from your fading ashes. After a bitter discourse under a blanket of cold winter night did one of them spoke something which I would carry a long, long way

"A million year old friendship need not be one for the rest of your life, if aint realised, if aint respected, if aint deserved"

Another evening, another sky full of a silver moon, an amphitheater running amok with prospective mentors, CEOs, entrepreneurs. Emphatic it would sound, but never one would find a story from rags to riches so close to see. Never one would see so many unemployed turning millionaires over night. Never one would feel the angst, agony, passion, fight and glory unless one gets to be a part of it.

"Right in the middle of desert, one finds an oasis.. The traveler is just a passing moment.. That which realizes the glory of it is the desert" - Rumi

Today, after exactly one year I feel, Iv grown a million years, wised a million times, and redefined my understanding of how far can I pull myself before to call it
quits. For good or for bad, would tell the test of time. But this animal farm has rebelled and morphed into genuinity which was somewhere lost midst the long blinding beliefs. Amazingly the difference is only self realised.

"Remember, the beauty of intellect is never observed but only realised" - Harvard Business Review :)