The Last of the Mohicans

It’s the 30th of May 2006. Captain’s log and all that.
Tomorrow, on the 31st of May, I leave Pune to go to Bangalore. I’ll be working as a Data Analyst for Genpact, and among the multitude of problems that seem to have beset my life right now, a rather prominent one is that I still have no clue about exactly what it is that I’m going to be doing.
You know the feeling, right? When someone asks you with that rather confused, rather earnest look on their face, “So… Exactly what are you going to be doing?”
At which point of course, you cough, look over the undiplomatic so-and-so’s shoulder and say “Haan, haan… coming.”
Graceful exit.
But that isn’t the focal point of this posting. The focal point of this posting is that I’m off to Bangalore, and among my buddies, I’m the last one to leave mama’s nest. Well, almost. But still and all, I’ll call myself the Last of the Mohicans.
It rained here in Pune today. Like the Dickens. Oh by the way, one more digression. Why Dickens? What’s with him and the rains?
Back when I was a really small kid, the arrival of the rains would simply mean jumping about with gay abandon on the streets, getting thoroughly wet, and coming back home to a hot bath and a plateful of mummy’s best. Thankfully, that routine hasn’t really changed over the years. What has changed is that life has added new subroutines to the program at each year.
Over time, rains came to mean ugly plastic shoes and lunch breaks with the rain pouring down. It would signify the arrival of a new scholastic year, heralding a new set of teachers, a new set of abstruse challenges in new subjects and one less year of school life to go, although we never thought of it that last way.
After that, rains meant standing in long serpentine queues to get forms that would see us being admitted to the colleges of our choice. New friends, new relationships, new crushes and a new way of life. Each of us made choices, relating to academia, friends, special someone’s that have stayed with us ever since.
But for the really lucky ones among us, it didn’t change anything else in particular. We’d still be at home, most of us, or what we’d come to call home, in the case of those who stayed in hostels. We’d live the carefree student life, learn the art of drinking, smoking, abusing, loving, hating, bunking, laughing, crying, sharing and forgiving. Life was preparing us for the shocks that it had kept in shore.
Somebody’s parents would expire, or somebody might not make it through an entrance exam that he or she had set his heart upon. Someone might leave India to go study abroad, while yet another would discover a little too late that he’d made the wrong academic choice. Somebody would fall head over heel in love only to find that Cupid had played him a horrible hand. And other such problems that beset all sorts of people in this kind of age. Life teaches only through it’s laboratories.
And then comes the time when college life would get over, as it has today. And we’ve to strike out on our own in the big bad world. Live our own life and earn our own bread. Make it on our own. Which isn’t a bad thing, but it is a little overwhelming.
College is over. The time for the kind of innocent stupidity that had become our hallmark is now gone. Or at least, that’s the new rule in town.
Heaven help society. It thinks we’ve become adults, all of us.