The Second PU Poem

Just as i was thinking of rounding off the base series with a photo album of last week, when we relived the trip, i found this poem in my bag. Its primitive, its kiddish. But it chronicles my second PU year in entirety n i would have it no other way :)...so here it is...lets c how the album works out next, that'll be a fittin ending...

A YEAR WELL SPENT

I was part of a crazy group once,

Kept doing the stupidest things ever.

I have grown up now, but in all these years,

Friends like these I have found again never.

The void best of three toss to decide,

The bunking that would anyway happen.

The rush to play pool at the usual place,

After every game the teams we were swapping.

The poem-writing contests, the tic-tac games,

The lunches we ate in English hours.

The rushing off to Mama’s house at every chance,

Worrying about suspensions, while dodging cars.

The aimless wandering, the burning of fuel,

Confessions from the scooter’s back seat.

The dancing to songs in orange sweaters,

Making obscene gestures to the beat.

The laughing while a sad scene plays on screen,

Shouting nonsense in the theatre’s dark.

To top it all, the hypocrisy about the exam,

The confidence that we will make a mark.

In the evenings as we approached Base,

The sneaky turns to the Bajji shop.

The trudging walk to MTR soon followed,

Promising each time to give it all a stop.

Those windy sojourns on the flyover’s peak,

Giving the finger to the people down below.

The walking in circles till our legs gave way,

Our haunt the roads that I still don’t well know.

Shooting videos in the rain, as we danced without a care,

Listening to music on almost any device.

All the useless, unwanted advice that we exchanged,

Trying to outwit the other, to show we were more wise.

As I peer down memory lane, I reflect,

Had I been different, would things have changed?

But as our laughter echoes in my ear,

I realize I’d have done it all over again.

THE (not just A) walk to remember- 3

Three ice-cream bowls in our stomachs, things took a turn for the crazier...a true chronicle of the events that followed...the finale to the series dearest to me :)...i especially love the ending...read on...

PART-3

The way to MTR is fraught with traffic, many diversions and one too many bright lights. It’s not exactly a pleasant walk, but the fact that I was with my best buddies and that we were doing absolutely nothing useful was catalyst enough for me to amble on. And pretty soon, just like that, we were there. We made our way to our table which, obviously, was empty. It knew we were coming.

We ordered our three hot chocolate fudges, and tucked into them soon as they were on our table. Somehow we weren’t satisfied with just one and decided to have another, then another. Now when that much that sugar has entered your system, you had better be prepared to find a way to vent all the resultant energy. Going by the evening’s trend of course, we didn’t know exactly what we were going to do next. Around fifteen minutes after we’d left MTR, I first felt it. Mama was talking to be about football.

‘Man U has too many supporters as it is you know? Half of them don’t know why they support them..’ he hadn’t finished.

‘YA MAN!! I support Chelsea only because I like the color blue. BLUE BABY!!’ I started shouting, interrupting him. Something told me I couldn’t, shouldn’t talk slowly or walk slowly for that matter. Everything had to be done fast and loud now; I was getting hyperactive. Mama looked at me for a while.

‘Are you ok man? What the hell happened to you just now?’

‘Dude I just feel like…you know...we’ve got to do something man!! Not just walk around man, let’s run a little, let’s sweat, you know…MOVE!!’

‘I feel the same way dude…’ Midget and Thangi corroborated my views. We all looked at each other for a long second. ‘LET’S RUN MAN!!’

And then we ran. For no joy, if you might like to ask. Thangi lived a few lanes parallel to MTR and so we ran in a general direction away from there. It would certainly do him no good to be spotted by his mother running on the streets like a rabid dog during Base hours. For about ten minutes we just ran, the only sound being our panting and our footsteps. People we passed by just stared as us in fear, thinking that we were eluding pursuit from someone. After that, we stopped to catch our breath, utterly tired but exhilarated.

‘Dude, look at that chick near the main road!’Midget shouted.

‘Where? Let’s run up to her and check!’ I shouted. And we ran all the way to the main road to see whether Midget had spotted well. Suffice to say we did not regret our decision.

After that it was back to some aimless walking, albeit with some residue of the sugar-induced craziness still resident in us. In one of the lanes, we found a huge, stray dog and an empty wine bottle lying beside it. I dared Mama to break the bottle right beside the dog and see whether it chased us. On another day, he might have flat refused me, but today nothing was crazy enough.

He took the bottle off the ground, and before I could tell him I was kidding, he broke the bottle right beside the dog. It awoke with a start and jumped aside with a yelp. We were almost relieved that it was not going to do anything, when suddenly I started barking and chased us.

‘Mother! RUN!!’ Mama shouted and we ran for our lives. A woman living in one of the houses lining the side came out shouting, disturbed by the commotion. But we were already far off from the place.

Five minutes after we had ran away and had calmed down; we finally remembered to take a look at the time. At was 8.15, fifteen minutes till Base got over! We had to get back in time, as Migdet had to catch a van from the place to go home. There were other reasons why he had to get there on time, but we won’t get into them, or he will strangle me the next time I see him.

And so we made our way to Base, reliving the whole evening in our minds on the way. Running away right in front of the base attendant, dancing in the rain on the road, standing on the flyover listening to music, the MTR ice-cream and the consequent craziness, the bottle-breaking…the day was memorable, if nothing.

As we neared the building, unconsciously a feeling of solemnity, of responsibility crept into us. Unbidden, the realization that this could not happen too often occurred to me. By the time we reached Base, we had calmed down and looked just like any of the countless students that were now filing out onto the streets. I turned to the others and said what I felt I had to.

‘We cherish this, because we are not doing this again. Deal?’

We all agreed that it was for the best. And so we went home that day, happier than we had probably been in a long, long time. The next day I came to Base again, only this time I was going to sit in class. I smiled silently to myself as I climbed up the stairs that we had run down yesterday. I made my way to class to find the other three sitting seriously and doing some problems. I sat down beside them and joined in. I was into my second problem when a hand fell upon my shoulder and I looked up to see who it was.

He was here, after such a long time. Another of our partners-in-crime, but one who we didn’t see much. You could trust him to be silent for long periods of time, and then say something that would totally crack you up. Like his idea of starting a show called ‘Pimp my Cow’.

Nikhil was here. He smiled at me and I felt scared. I did not want anyone to persuade me to bunk today and he was especially talented at that. He greeted all of us and sat in a bench behind us, with Thangi.

‘Guys I’ve already parked my vehicle somewhere else so that when we bunk we won’t get caught trying to take it out of there. So that’s been taken care of. Where do we bunk and go?’

We all laughed at his forethought and much as we tried to stop it, felt our resolve to study melt within us. Without a word this time, we got out of our seats and silently made our way through the exit before anyone could spot us.

And we were at it again. This time was almost as crazy, and by the end of the day we had managed to…

But that’s another story.

THE (not just A) walk to remember- 2

If you might remember, we'd just outrun the Base attendant and escaped from our prof's clutches. After a hearty snack of bajjis, we decided to amble along to the flyover. Here's wad happened...

‘You know it’s a far way off to the flyover right?’Midget asked. I found it pissing off that he was raising the doubt after right making the suggestion.

‘So what? Who cares? It’s not like pressed for time here; we have three hours to kill. Let’s just shut up and walk.’ I snapped.

We started walking. Just then, to truly make it an unforgettable day, it began to rain. At first we tried hopping from one place to another in a bid to stay dry. Put pretty soon we just gave in and immersed ourselves in the downpour. It was freedom the kind of which he hadn’t experienced in a long time. The utter freedom to do anything we wanted, with no guilt, no thoughts of ‘what if’, no nothing. Frankly, for those three hours that day none of us really cared where our life was going; it was all about making the best of the moment.

I don’t remember exactly what we were talking that day, but I distinctly remember it was about Ekta Kapoor’s soap serials. It began with Thangi dropping another revelation upon us, something he had heard from someone about someone. We all started making mock faces of shock, and soon conversation veered to Ekta.

‘Dude, define lame. I swear its spelt E K T A!’ said Mama, to roaring laughter. ‘Like imagine if we were in her show, and our parents got to know that we bunked Base, how would it be?’

I started making grotesque faces of horror, and shouted in a shrill voice, ‘What? What? What? And then there’ll be some obnoxiously loud music playing in the background, while we’re being attacked by obscure camera angles of the person on the screen, who’s probably making constipated expressions…’

And thus we went on, pun after pun on her. That’s when we committed our next fatal, glorious mistake. We saw this run-down garage kind of place right by the side of the road, with its shutter down. We decided to stand under it for some shelter as the rain was getting too heavy. After a few minutes, we got bored and were deliberating on what to do. The flyover was just a stone’s throw away, and we wanted to stand right at its zenith and look down at the traffic below.

That’s when Thangi said, ‘Come on dude let’s dance here right in front of everybody.’ He and Midget had a good laugh over the suggestion (we were so drunk with the moment; we’d laugh at the drop of a hat). Unfortunately Mama and I really liked the suggestion. Midget took out his cell phone, sensing a moment he didn’t want to miss. And dance we did.

‘You guys are so going to regret this dude!’ he laughed out loud as Mama and me started shaking our hands and moving our behinds, in full view of people who blatantly stared at us as they drove by. Thangi kept laughing throughout, not even stopping to say anything.

‘If my mom sees…’ I trailed off, busy thinking up new steps. That’s when Mama started doing the old hand-pointing-towards-the-sky-disco style step, evicting fresh laughter from Midget.

‘Hey guys, here’s the Johhny Bravo dance!’ I said, and jigged to the only dance step I’d ever done right in my entire lifetime. Pretty soon, I was joined by Mama. I passerby almost fell off his scooter as he stared at us. Then Mama did the moonwalk on the pavement beside the road and we were almost lying down in laughter. After that we realized that we had run out of steps, and also that we’d been soaked in the rain during our impromptu performance.

‘We’re wet anyways; let’s just go to the flyover. I can’t wait to stand on the top, giving the finger to the traffic below, while listening to the ‘Arriving somewhere but not here’ guitar solo’ Midget muttered.

‘YEAH man!!’ All of us screamed in unison. Another great idea.

So we made our way to the flyover, discussing more Porcupine Tree songs on the way. It seemed like Midget and me could never get enough of them, and we would talk of nothing else. I think we were talking about ‘The sound of Muzac’. We made our way quickly to the zenith, at the point where the flyover just about started curving downwards. The four of us stood there, and Mama put the guitar solo on his cell’s loudspeaker. As always, the solo managed to mesmerize us, and drenched in the moment, we forgot all our worries, our concerns. My mind was a churning pot of smelting emotions.

‘Why am I here? How is this helping my life?

Chuck it!! You’re with friends, you’re finally having fun, what else do you need?

Shouldn’t I be sad about doing this? Isn’t this against my parents’ wishes?

All that studying hasn’t helped you an inch. It’s eating out your life bit-by-bit. It’s how education here’s been. Worry about it on another day, just enjoy right now!!’

And so at that moment, I dropped all my apprehensions, and just roared as I raised my hands and showed the finger to all the vehicles passing underneath. Pretty soon all of us were doing the same thing. It felt like flying.

In another fifteen minutes, we were back on level ground, metaphorically too. Sobered down by the experience, the same argument was running through all of their minds. Without exchanging a single word, our concerns were conveyed to each other. I guess that’s how it is with bros, and if anything, we were that. That was when each one of their faces broke into a silent, mischievous grin and I knew they had reached at the same conclusion I had.

‘Ok, I agree we shouldn’t be doing this again anytime soon. Our country’s system will not give us another chance to help ourselves if we screw up this opportunity. Our intelligence is a responsibility we cannot let down, right? Never again’ I announced rather formally.

‘Well at least not until we’re this bored again’ Mama slyly muttered. We all laughed at that, knowing full well that regardless of what we said, this wasn’t to be the last time.

‘Yeah well, whatever. On that note, how about we go MTR, have some ice-cream on our table. We still got enough time for that.’ I suggested. By our table, I was referring to a particular table where we always sat whenever we went to MTR, a popular ice-cream parlor nearby. After a few moments of thought, everyone agreed to the plan, and we started the long trudge to MTR, almost two kilometers away, sloshing our way through every puddle we could find.

As I walked with some of the best friends I’d ever made in my life, I thought of what else could happen. I guessed we would just go to MTR, have some nice ice-cream, talk and laugh a little and get back to Base at 8.30, by which time the classes would be over and we could leave with everyone else, like decent students.

But then little was I to know that the evening wasn’t over yet. That there was an incredible amount of nonsense, stupidity and general aimlessness in store for us in the next hour. But right now, I was just thinking of the Hot Chocolate fudge I was going to have there.

What happens when you have three excessively sweet bowls of ice-cream? Some crazy shit, trust me…