caritra irukulalO irukkunna irusulu.

prajA taamasamlO paDi lEvalEni pAmarulu.

చరిత్ర ఇరుకులలో ఇరుక్కున్న ఇరుసులు.

ప్రజా తామసమ్లో పడి లేవలేని పామరులు.

This is something I read a long time back and just remember it. Don’t even remember who said it or in what context.

Literally, I think it translates to:

Spokes stuck in the cracks of history

Peasants who can’t stand up against the huge wave of humanity.

Today morning I woke up thinking about my school days and people I knew from school. Why? When coming back from India, the person sitting next to me was Anup Veer, a classmate from the 2^nd class to the 10^th. After 10^th I never met him, but heard about him a few times from other friends. And there he was suddenly in the airplane coming towards me asking me if I was Srikant. It was a good moment I suppose. When you meet someone after 16 years and start recollecting old memories and catching up on each others life. That was one reason the flight was not tiring. So Anup, has been in the back of my mind for the past few days and he was the catalyst for me to think about others I knew from school.

School days are supposed to be the best in one’s life. But is it true for everyone? If they were so great, and if everyone has so much fun then, I suppose each and every person has a huge cache of friends from those days. I think when most of us go to reunions; we go to gloat or feel remorseful about ourselves when compared to others or just to meet up old acquaintances from those days, or for what ever reasons. Very few times do we meet to go back to catch a very old friend and maintain contact with that person from that point on. Moreover, the caustic relationship we shared with people those days still resides in some corner of our memories and we still hesitate to frankly interact with those we meet in the reunions. As we grow older we grow more cynic and more …..

I personally feel that my school years were a really bad phase of my life. It was because of a combination of many things. No proper guidance was the main thing, I suppose. But overall, all I remember from school was that I was a failure in studies and did a lot of idiotic things and so on. I was a huge sympathizer of the left those days and was also politically very opinionated. But there was no proper guidance for my thoughts nor my actions. In school, all it resulted in was some warnings from the principal, or teachers. At home, my Dad who was a very strict disciplinarian those days (he still is in some ways), would just scold or worst case slap me once or twice. But no one knew what I was going through or (I am not sure) if they even understood the gravity of things.

I knew after my 10^th that I was not in the bottom percentile in studies when compared to my peers and was actually on the higher end. But, till my 10^th, my marks were real bad. Once I scored half a mark out of 100 in Physics. :) And in college Physics was one of my best subjects. I failed Telugu in my 9^th finals and later in college and afterwards, I was writing poetry, drama and songs in Telugu. So sad.

Ok, back to the first sentence and its correlation to school. There are people who just stick in some corner of your mind / memories. Just like in my essay “Vaise bhi itnaa gham .........” You do not know what they are doing, where they are now, and so on. But you still are a little bit curious. I was thinking about some of the people I knew in School and was wondering how life was treating them.

:)