Photographs From The Album Of Memories

While we were living in our Most Beautiful Days, we did capture uncountable Moments that we thought we are never going to lose. And we were so right, we didn't lose them at all, just that some got faded as time passed by, but the warmth and the brightness in everyone's eyes still remains...

Definitely, Sands of Time passed away, forming another Dune in some other place, several things did come and go by, as it was meant to, but whenever I look at these photographs, each and every moment comes rushing back to me, and I live them happily, once more, in just a flash of Lightning...

I post some of those captures here, I will post some more later, as I dig them out from the Album Of Great Memories...

Take A Look...

Mriganka

It doesn’t often happen that when you are new in a city and especially when you are coming from an entirely different environment, you don’t find people of caring nature towards people like me. After the first three months in Calcutta, I was admitted to a school very much misguided by the relatives we had here, and dad got scared and got me into the first school ­­­­he came across that looked decent for my higher secondary academics. And G.D.B. didn’t turn out to be quite a nice place (school) as I expected in the first days. The corridors were dark and the boys had a separate corner for them to spend the allotted 6 hours of the working days in school and loads of restrictions like “No Toilets before or after lunch or talking to girls of that school of drinking water from the water cooler before or after recess”, and the worst of all, no matter how less cold you feel, you are to wear a blazer in the winters. Anyway, I didn’t make any friends in this school even though I came to this city with an open mind for a new life, but as days passed I really realized that how much those days meant to me which I have left behind.

Mriganka was a guy whom anyone would have mistaken for a nerd. But I discovered that he chose to remain silent. My friendship with that guy was all a collection of funny and baseless happenings. I was a fan of BLUE and my favourite songs were One Love, Fly By, and You Make Me Wanna. By chance, his one of the favorite track happened to be Fly By and he heard me sing it once and next moment we were discussing all music from George Michael to Linkin Park which was then the name I was alien to and I was not at all into hard rock and that distorted guitar sounds in those days. The next song which he loved to hear from me was Careless Whisper and funny thing about this song was the first time I sang it for him, he kept waiting for the stanza when the pitch went high and when I did that part, he was so amazed that I could do it coz he had heard no one else doing it. And we were drowning into the newfound friendship. All this happened in a single day! J . Gradually, we were good friends and the next song that he suggested me was Desert Rose by Sting and he loved the part when the Arabic part came into play. We discussed all sort of songs almost all our time together till we parted ways to see each other next day. He always used to bring for Tiffin, a sort of chocolate chip cookies that I always loved to have, and many of the guys flocked around him for those cookies but he used to do one thing, for which I am still grateful and honoured. He used to push everyone back and me offered the first ones, after which he used to have one or two himself and then only the rest were allowed to have one or half or even quarter. We used to sit side by side all of 11^th beside the window and talk about many things not caring about what the teacher taught. We devised our ways of having fun every day. One day in late December, 26^th it was, he invited me and Arunava (a mutual friend) to dinner to his house which I thought was his birthday invite and I got him a perfume coz I could think of nothing else basically. :P that day aunty cooked us Biriyani and chicken curry and salad and we all had loads of fun with rounds of Careless Whispers and Desert Roses. We messed around with a lot with his computer and the two of them forced me to create an account in Orkut for the first time in my life. Before which I was a total alien to social networking sites and they both added me as friends right away.

11^th passed on like this, 12^th arrived with bitter and unpleasant surprises. Mriganka was a die-hard Linkin Park fan and I was not too much except for the song, Numb and In The End which caught my ears in the late 11^th. He also listened to Marilyn Manson and he tried to convince me to like them but somehow I wasn’t convinced at all. In the middle of 12^th he had got me into his famous download addict too. I remember in 11^th he had once applied for a limited 400 MB monthly plan in broadband and he downloaded so much of material that he got a bill for 17000 bucks the next month. Haha. So carrying on to the story, the results of my 12^th internal exams were on the highway to detour and I started becoming frustrated and irritated and Mriganka and I started drifting apart until we planned the teacher’s day show in which we decided to do What I’ve Done (Linkin Park) and changed it in the last moment to Numb. On the D-day, we screwed up the performance and friendship between us was almost shattered. I was very much pissed on him, the school, and Calcutta. Later that year, he dropped out from his 12^th exams and I went to give the engineering entrance exams as well in April. Later, when exam results were out, I decided to take a drop to study for next year’s engineering entrances.

September arrived, and I had forgotten all about the past bitterness between me and Mriganka. The film Rock On released on 29^th and while I was passing through Hiland Park one night with mom and dad, I suddenly called up Mriganka and asked if he would accompany me to catch that movie coming Monday and he agreed and I bought two tickets that very night. We met up after about seven months and it seemed that we both needed each other; it was like lost friends meeting after twenty years. I paid for his tickets that day and the film was inspiring, we laughed and cried at all appropriate moments and that day, it was a fresh start to a forgotten friendship…

That very day, we decided to live the dream we once let go, forming a rock band. We kept meeting and chatted on Yahoo Messenger and I used to plug my guitar and we used to jam on the internet. On that December 1^st, I played guitar till 3 in the morning as a present on his birthday, the songs he asked me to play, Here Without You, Home, and many others. Every time we met, we went close to writing a song, but end up spending time with computer all the time, he gave me all his collections and I gave him whatever I owned and downloaded, all my favourites. Once again, the entrance exams were coming up, and we got a little busy, but never lost touch. And then, on the day of IIT-JEE, we shared the same exam centre, talked a lot on break and end, and visits increased. After the results were out and counseling had started, my counseling sessions were first and his sessions followed. I selected NSEC-IT and I informed him to take the same coz I badly wanted to be with him, but he selected HIT-CSE coz it was better. We both still promised to make our dream come true. Before the start of college, he came to my house and forced me to watch a series named How I Met Your Mother, which I did and I swear on him that it was Legen-wait-for-it-DARY, LEGENDARY.

It was the last time he came to my house. Even though I went to his house several times after this, but his priorities had changed. He had found better friends where he was. I realized he was among friends that he deserved, friends that I should’ve been to him but I never was. I never got a chance to make it up to him. He withdrew himself from the band a few months later and I remained alone with the dream that we once started. I am left with the Happy little memories that he was a part of, his first guitar that he bought with me, the chocolate chip cookies in his tiffin, Harry Potter 6, the last film together, his beautifully edited Street Shots, and most important, my only and BEST friend from the GDB days…

Flashbacks - Stolen Dreams

Almost a year went by since we came to this place. It did give us memories, bittersweet, worth looking back to. I carved out a lifetime out of it and yet that lifetime seems so incomplete. Life is changed now but its definitely not the way it was supposed to be.

Those people to whom I meant so much, I don’t matter anymore. I am just a face they say “hi” to everyday. I don’t come among their best friends anymore. But I still remember the day when I didn’t meet them and everybody called each other up that night. A day without them seemed so incomplete. Sometimes today I find myself waiting for just an sms of anyone, but none comes at the end of the day. People tell me to move on, grow up. But I don’t know how to do either. If moving on means to forget all the memories and replace friends then I don’t know how people can even ask to do this or do it themselves.

I have lost almost all the things closest to my heart and people don’t even tell me where I went wrong. I forgot to laugh and I miss how much I loved to laugh, when I rushed to my friends to share a funny incident that just happened with me. I remember when Nirmalya and Aditi waited 2 hours for my Graphics class to get over and I rushed to them without looking at anyone. I remember when Aditi’s section got changed and Nirmalya got so upset that he started cracking painful jokes as if he was going to die the next day. And Pratip was so upset he asked to go to Aditi’s house and spent a lot of time just goofing around and aunty providing us nice meal and I remember I munched up Aditi’s part too coz she said she was full he he.

One day, I remember it was 16^th January. Arka was supposed to come from his Haridwaar trip and I was the only person supposed to know that fact. Next day we planned a surprise to call everyone at Hiland Park and Arka would come there and surprise everyone and it went badly wrong when Pritam and Pratip saw him hiding behind the Box Office Ticket counters. But Aditi was still to be surprised and she came strolling lightly and up the escalator and we told her that we had a surprise for her and she turned and let out a Squeal of happiness to see Arka there. And she beat us all up with her little flat palmed pats and her famous innocently beautiful face that she tried to make angry but failed badly. This day didn’t end here. We all wanted Photograph of the moment, and I did the volunteering for clicking it and got warned not to click pictures at the mall and the guard pointed at a sign that was supposed to be PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED but turned out to read TAKE CARE OF YOUR CHILDREN. And we laughed at her face. She was so embarrassed that she kicked us out of the mall coz I was standing in the escalator in facing the opposite direction and sometimes walking up the down-going escalator. Then we had no choice but to accompany Arka to College Street and to add to the spice, BY LOCAL TRAIN which wasn’t so usual for Adi and Pratip.

We bought cold drinks at Sealdah and walked a way that we weren’t sure lead to college street or not, yet we kept walking. Before everything we decided to have some snacks at the Coffee House but no snack was available before half an hour, so we needed to get evidences that we have been to coffee house that day so My phone was in very much demand and when everybody agreed that it was impossible to click the photo of all of us, I devised a self shot which luckily worked (which even I didn’t expect).

Now before we read on, I gotta tell this, Pritam and Aditi had said to their moms that they were going for Studies, and Pritam suddenly got a call from home after which he looked like the earth was going to end after half n hour, and he ran home like hell, we all kept watching almost speechless and reaction-less. Let’s face it, It was too quick for any of us to respond properly! We didn’t even got to say bye to him properly. By that time we were all starving and Arka suggested to taste a Roll which was supposed to be delicious (and famous) around the corner of the footpath that we were walking but the place was closed so we were stuck me and Aditi basically had nothing to do coz we came to kill some time (Aditi also had her college bag to pretend that she was going for some very important thing), so we parted, Arka and Pratip went to buy their stationery and we strolled back towards the metro station. Aditi had her music classes later that afternoon which she eventually bunked and she also told me that she was bunking the classes for the past three weeks. I and Aditi laughed so hard about it, all through the metro ride home.

There are countless occasions and incidents and accidents with Aditi that I still remember and the gang always held on to. I remember Aditi called me one day just because she didn’t see me or any of the other guys at college that day and she missed us this badly. I guess today I am not a person she misses anymore, and somehow I was forgotten from among her close friends too, though I want to say this – I miss her and she will always remain my best friend…