The NIMC Times [Part 7]

Down the memory lane in times of yore, some may be peddling across the corporate threshold, but if you swim across the edge of professionalism and build your nest, you may soon groove out with it. Times when one hardly gets to think of past notions, of past explorations and of exploits, of past ambles and of scandals, the memory of which will make you go whimper of nothing but praying for the well being.

…And in the good times before everything began to look the same, in times before adventure became a night out, in times when the library smelled of jokers and barracks had not yet converted to amusement squares, in times before seat belts in lecture halls were not fastened, desks were not scribbled with emerald lines, quickie précis or olive excerpts, in times when soccer matches were not yet played inter college and spies really did come out from the Eden garden, times before speed digitals and LAN messengers with overheard missed call conversations were on the run, before stock options and answers tickled the Inferno, in the good times when cynics were not stateless, in times, long ago, I vowed never to leave my track and become a wet blanket waxing lyrical about the past and having let go.

Deep in sleep and reverie about it, deep in sleep it lies. The still lake of summer water and under the still skies; many a fathom below, the new fishes would now soon come. Blessed was the boundary within which you carved your foundry, as one exalted in its pride, and for the still lake, to lie afresh and gloom, and a lost place beside the lake, deep asleep till doom?

In times before mess became an overcrowded oasis and before the googling of everything and slides of paperwork, in times before branding of jargons and power breakfasts with crack of dawn break-out sessions and thinking out of the box, in times of ideological battles of just a minute and bruising debates over whatnot, times when every second person was not a hero and every third was not a victim of the forth who in turn was out for his next girl, in times before channel surfing and online everything, in times of the introductory hippie trails in the back porches and before the war on test series, in those times, way back when, I would not have thought there could be so many elegant jokers at one time in Calcutta.

They say its never safe to long for something until you're absolutely certain there's no chance of its coming back. But I’m sure the NIMC times would always reverie us back to the lovely place. NIMC was our grammar lesson. We found the present tense and the past perfect.

But if the good times were that illusory, if recalling them is no more than a tale of middle age, how come they feel so good? Give or take an interlude or a joyful passage, and things are always about the same jaunt along the side track. And with unbearable thoughts of limbic bursts, NIMC begins to glow.