“Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.”

- Kevin Arnold

An interesting quote I found the other day during my travels on the internet. I was searching for mnemonic devices on the internet and found this quote. Serendipity in its true form.

Anyway, the reason that I am writing about all of this is because I recently took a trip down memory lane and visited my engineering days. As Yuri mentioned, missing your engineering days is a testament to the power of nostalgia. We see everything in full blown colour, yet our memories always seem to have a tone of sepia in them. Its almost as if the brain wants to ensure a sense of mellowness about the things that have been.

Some things that I reminisced:

1. We had loads of time on our hand. It certainly seems that way now considering that we used to play football every day, including exam days. Sure, we used to fret during the build up to the exams that we could have done with some extra time for preparation. However, I am sure that we would have spent even the PL in playing some sort of sport. I guess it has something to do with age, raging hormones and stuff. We had to wear off the excessive energy. Kind of like Bryan Adams sings in Summer of 69: we were young & restless, we needed to unwind. And the subsequent lyrics are very true, too: I guess nothin’ can last forever, forever, no!
2. We could go days without sleeping. And possibly nights too. We were never had any sleep debt, mostly because classroom lectures were utilized for recovering the sleep we missed due to playing table tennis throughout the night.Sleep was definitely over-rated way back then.
3. Rock music sustained us through engineering: Joe Satriani, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Eagles, Scorpions et al. ensured that we could take our minds out of our daily conundrums (resulting from engineering knowledge or lack thereof). We were transported magically to a different world, where head banging was the norm and anyone who liked the Backstreet Boys was termed as gay!
4. News papers & News channels were hated like hell. Till the final year of course. That is when we realized that the key to success in GD&PI was reading voraciously from news papers and magazines. Up until the final year, we looked at newspapers in the common room as something the workers in the hostel required and also as cleanup agents after a cake smothering party. Tip: Newspapers are the best way to clean your face after someone has splattered cake/pastry on it. The ubiquitous newspaper was also the way to pass time as you waited for your girlfriend to get ready in the girls hostel lobby.
5. We cared a lot about our exam percentage than we cared to show: all of us appeared like studs when discussing our marks. Its no big deal, man. I know I could have done better, but it doesn’t matter. Deep down, we always wished that we’d studied a bit more, to have gotten just that few percentage more. Result days were spent planning for future successes. But we left it that, most of the times.
6. Our school days seemed the best days of our life at that time. Just goes to show that the older we get, the better we feel about the past.

/Radgovin