{"id":47,"date":"2003-06-05T17:22:24","date_gmt":"2003-06-05T11:52:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wokay.in\/?p=513"},"modified":"2003-06-05T17:22:24","modified_gmt":"2003-06-05T11:52:24","slug":"nostalgia-bites-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2003\/06\/05\/nostalgia-bites-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Nostalgia Bites II"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The air conditioner in this room has kicked in, and I&#8217;ve finished my Career Launcher exercise. I am now ready to write again. Delight. Joy. Let&#8217;s get on with it, shall we?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been talking to even more people since I came back. What with this heat, talking over the phone is all I can do- going out and meeting them is infeasible. It&#8217;s still all good. This Fillet is about the deeper cosmic significance of the nostalgia attacks I&#8217;ve been suffering.<\/p>\n<p>The first flutterings of nostalgia were triggered this February. It started with a guy from Final Year Mech. called C. Seshagiri. For obvious reasons, he&#8217;s called C-Dot.<\/p>\n<p>What C-Dot did in February was this: he took a committee of the IEE student chapter called the Survey team and did lots through it. He started French classes on campus on his own initiative. He started a publicity team to market TIET to corporates for research projects and placements. He even tried to organise an inter-university techfest, and would have done so successfully, only the Director pulled the plug at the last minute.<\/p>\n<p>That C-Dot did this at all is quite remarkable, and shows him in a very good light. He&#8217;d got brilliant grades, he&#8217;d been placed in Maruti, and it was final semester. He didn&#8217;t need to do anything for the college, especially since our college doesn&#8217;t really do a lot for us, but he did it anyway.<\/p>\n<p>By now, you must be asking yourself what all this has to do with nostalgia.<\/p>\n<p>Well, here it is. Even though they had very different motives, this flurry of activity on C-Dot&#8217;s part reminded me of the one initiated by Maya [She still talks like the TGV moves- Baldy (Quotes 16:44)] Jain back when I was in Class 12.<\/p>\n<p>That was what triggered it. The resemblance is trivial, but nevertheless it affected me at the time.<\/p>\n<p>After that, of course, I started the W-Fillets, and started getting replies from people whom I had classified as long lost- Ankur, Dolan, et cetera. Nostalgia piled up a little more.<\/p>\n<p>Another trigger was Rishi getting his exchange programme, which reminded me of his earlier exchange programme, my own trips abroad, and brought back a little more memories.<\/p>\n<p>So now we go into the whole cosmic and spiritual significance bit.<\/p>\n<p>I think it isn&#8217;t <em>just<\/em> nostalgia. I&#8217;m beginning to believe that my life these days is actually beginning to take on facets of what it used to be like five to three years ago.<\/p>\n<p>Here are the resemblances:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>My co-curricular life- quizzes, programming, et cetera is on an upswing. I&#8217;m quizzing after three years, and coaching (well, trying to coach) after the same duration. The quizzing isn&#8217;t a lot, either, but at least it&#8217;s there.<\/li>\n<li>Rishi&#8217;s off on an exchange program again, just as he was four years ago. Similarly, Baldy is once again globetrotting to attend global conclaves.<\/li>\n<li>Many people are once again either just entering a new educational program or about to leave it. I know that&#8217;s something pretty obvious given that a Bachelor&#8217;s degree is only so long, but it&#8217;s a resemblance nonetheless.<\/li>\n<li>On a psychological level, also, people seem to be what they were in those days. Shiven, for instance, who was quite depressed for almost a year is now back to his old areskicking, determined self. Madhav, too, has started using bad words after a long period of abstinence.<\/li>\n<li>You want coincidence? How&#8217;s this for coincidence? Two Sundays ago, at my Career Launcher MBA coaching class (where I&#8217;m being coached, not doing the coaching, please don&#8217;t get confused with the earlier point), who should walk in but The Person Formerly Known As The Q? Unexpected and unannounced.<\/li>\n<li>Most importantly, perhaps, is that my love life is hopeless once again. Since Class 12, I was always trying in one direction or the other, hopeful that something would work out in the face of all obstacles. Nowadays, though, I&#8217;m resigned to being cast in the mould of Bertie Wooster. Class 11 again.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are other coincidences, too. Like the first question of the first exercise of the English Usage book from Career Launcher being about Preity Zinta. Or the ratio of N\/(N+1) being discussed out there. Or Mansha being propositioned by a lesbian. Or many other things. Chances are, if I&#8217;ve written about something in a W-File, a W-Fillet, or Quotes List, it&#8217;s popped up in some other context somehow. And I realise that I&#8217;m not explaining it very well, but it&#8217;s something so nebulous that even I don&#8217;t know exactly what point it is that I&#8217;m trying to make.<\/p>\n<p>But let&#8217;s summarise.<\/p>\n<p>Over the past few months, there have been a series of remarkable coincidences in my life, which seem to link all its different facets together, and which have also sparked off a nostalgia wave. When I act upon the nostalgia wave, and call my old friends up, I discover even more connections.<\/p>\n<p>So, there are two conclusions that can be drawn. The first is that I&#8217;m beginning to see what Dirk Gently, aka Svlad Cjelli calls &#8216;the fundamental interconnectedness of the universe&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>The second is that there is no fundamental interconnectedness in the universe, and these visions of connections are merely a symptom of schizhophrenia, which happens to run in the family.<\/p>\n<p>If it&#8217;s the first, though, then the implication is this- that for an unknown period of time, I&#8217;m not driving my life so much as surfing it on a wave of fate. Setting a route isn&#8217;t relevant any more, it&#8217;s foreseeing and navigating the obstacles on the way that&#8217;ll be important. That is my current fatalistic frame of mind.<\/p>\n<p>Do let me know what you think. Particularly you, PP, I want to know whether your initial reaction was &#8216;How DUMB!&#8217; or something more on the lines of &#8216;Classic sci-fi, fitted into all the characters we know so well&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s taken me almost two hours to write this Fillet. I&#8217;m going to sleep now. Fin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The air conditioner in this room has kicked in, and I&#8217;ve finished my Career Launcher exercise. I am now ready to write again. Delight. Joy. Let&#8217;s get on with it, shall we? I&#8217;ve been talking to even more people since I came back. What with this heat, talking over the phone is all I can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-w-fillets"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-L","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}