Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Nostalgic feelings of a time traveller

Stories of time traveler part-1
I have loved & fantasized about the concept of time machine, the philosophical part of & the theoretical astrophysics part of it, seen it in several films & hence a kind of obsession. I was just wondering if I get a chance to time travel, how wonderful would that be. Probably I can go back to my high school days; they were probably the best days of my life, not very best to associate myself singing the ‘summer of 69’ for those memories, but they were worth a good recollect & enjoy feeling nostalgic about them. I would time travel back to my class & look at myself when I was an 18yrs old kid. So I continued imagining. A series of thoughts ran across my mind. The first period was Maths & Kulkarni started to explain factorization. Well there was nothing much exciting about it as myself along with few more others in class would have learnt the same in his tuition class few days earlier itself. I did not hate or dislike maths but just believed that unless you are a genius you cannot achieve anything great in it as it’s quite tough. That’s why I instantly appreciated Charles Herman’s (John Nash imaginary roommate) dialogue in the movie A beautiful mind which goes “Mathematics is never gonna lead you to higher truth, because it’s boring”. Sometimes the understanding would go void like division by zero is not defined. I wondered if there are any researches going on that understanding? On that day, I had factorized it so much some a2(a2+b2) equation that I went ahead un-factoring it & arriving at the question itself & wondering what was going on ? Accidentally I had scored 25 out of 25 in 1st test & kind of needed to maintain my reputation or impression n class, oh come on whom am I kidding? It was all for maintaining impression for girls; I took extra interest in learning things. I had heard that beauty & brains would not go together & I was happy with the thought that a beautiful girl would be interested in me. What to do with herself being intelligent anyway? There was this girl Neeta whom I used to ask doubts. She was too brilliant in maths that I often wanted to tell her that she must seriously think of going for higher education in some good university abroad. I never told her this I suppose. Some times we fail to tell things which we regret later in life. Then the science teacher walks in. she is kind of reading the science book & explaining things, not that interesting though. But the contents were my favorite as it was astronomy. It was more of astronomy fact book than a book intended to arouse curiosity & excitement in young student’s mind about the mysteries of universe. But since I loved astronomy from I don know like from second standard or something so I loved it anyway. That was the time when Pluto enjoyed its status as a planet; I feel pity for Pluto now. Lot of things have changed about mankind’s understanding & hence perception of universe since then, We have Hubble’s telescope encircling the earth & doing pretty good job taking very nice pics of deep sky objects which were never seen with best telescopes on earth, thus confirming the fact that galaxies are moving from each other, in other words our universe is expanding. Now we have observational evidence backed with statistical data to confirm the big bang theory which tells that our universe was created in big bang & since the bang galaxies are moving away from each other, also farther the distance between them the faster they are moving apart. I learnt more astronomy reading articles in newspapers than the science text book.
I was always a last bencher & wondered whether it was just owing to height, but still managed to get a pretty decent rank. I have always loved the last benches, because the probability of getting Line of Sight eye contact with teacher is less & you can be in your world exploring the humorous aspect of the things taught in class. the front seats are for the intelligent kids who are too ambitious & have clear goals in mind of what they wanna do in their lives, but as I have observed they end up doing quite the opposite of it. I had couple of friends telling that would join Army or navy & couple of them telling they would be astronauts. All of such kids have ended up in Infosys, TCS, and Wipro nowadays. The back benches are holy they are for the intellectual people like us who like to have their space & time to interpret things in their own way. Well in engineering classes the competition for getting back benches is more as suddenly the number of intellectuals tends to increase apart from the fact to avoid being asked for submission of assignments.
Then was the games period, the much awaited one, like the Vardan given by god after getting impressed for the morning prayers for so many years. Sir asked to count randomly 1 & 2 & made 2 teams to play football. After a while I forgot who my teammates were & after a while I forgot where my goalpost was. Probably I think others had forgotten as well, as everyone seemed to be running behind the ball. So I followed the rest, ran fast behind the ball wherever it went just trying to grab an opportunity to kick it & this was fun !!
Then as usual we went late to the moral science class as the sir would not scold about that. The subject was considered passé even then. He told some story centered around the concept of hope & at quoted at the end “We should have hopeful hope not hopeless hope” which was more practical as we can hope for things we can really achieve I life. Neither the school nor the students give much importance to moral science. I now believe that this should be given importance as these lessons make us more human. Make us realize what we want out of life, identify ourselves & our place in society which are very important to lead a good & happy life. Then we had the social science history class, we put the “F” word to right use the first time “Who the fuck cares when the battle of Plassey was fought or arrange bunch of such nonsense happenings in chronological order”. I seriously believed that we should not mug up things which we can always look up in book. Come on what is the purpose if preserving books for then? If we feel the need to throw away the book then we no longer need the things contained in the book.
The hindi class was always good as hindi teacher would read a line in the book & go on telling some interesting story & at the end of class she would always tell “dekho mein kahan se kahan pahoonch gaye” we all used to reply Kahin nahi pahoonche madam, bas chapter ke pehle line mein he hai ! & then there were tests & marks comparision. This was the time india was blessed with evergreen bollyhood hits like DDLJ & KKHH & DPT & it was good to imagine ourselves as hero & fall in love with beautiful girl in class.
I took a deep breadth & realized I don’t wanna return to present life’s mindset which is more of a routine & responsibilities etc. There is not much fun & we cannot do childish things anymore. ....

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