When my current Lit Sec of Sharav mailed me a few days ago, asking me to contribute to an in house hostel newsletter, I couldn’t help but to get out of my hate-to-type stance and jam down some 500 odd words about my last summer. One, because I like my Lit Sec a lot so didn’t want to say no. Two, I wanted to crib about not being home FOR THE PAST SEVEN MONTHS (I know I sound like a kid but I want to go home!) Okay, the write up that follows is very general and is just a plain summary of what exactly I did in summer, devoid of any flowery language or evocative phrases that I usually employ in my crappy poems! But nevertheless, it is better than just prophesying about posting at least something on my slowly dying blog…
My summer of 2013 was more or less decided when my wait-list in Indian Institute of Management Bangalore got confirmed. The day was 13th May. And my B Tech project review on 20th May. And I was to attend a warm up course at IIM Bangalore from 27th May. I knew I wasn’t going home which felt a little odd, given that I had never missed spending my vacations at home in the last twenty two years! The latter half of May was spent less on taming the Latex format to produce the perfect BTP report and more on bidding adieu to my dual friends who were going for the well deserved holidays after their hectic end semester exams. An era was ending, as my batch mates aptly flooded every possible social medium with notes, poems on this mantra. The last lunch, the final dinner, the very last coffee and the last few fart sessions; the heart wanted these moments to freeze forever but the mind wanted to move on, to newer avenues, to untrodden trails, to the next stage of life.
After surviving five back to back night outs and managing a decent presentation, I had exactly a week to wrap up the relics of four years in Chennai and head over to Bangalore. This included the dreaded collection of the infinite no dues certificates too! Meanwhile, one of my childhood friends came down to insti for a summer internship. I met her after a year and hence, the interlude wasn’t exactly nostalgic or so called ‘difficult to bear’. In fact, had I gone home instead of IIM Bangalore, I probably would have started missing insti. But I was fated to long jump from one campus to into another campus directly and the ‘missing phase’ was probably lost out in the ‘excited about the impending phase’!
The warm up courses started the day after I reached Bangalore. The drastic change in weather was more than enough to charge me up for my next phase of my academic life. In between round the clock classes, I caught up with few dual friends of mine doing internships in the city during the weekends. I also met up with another school friend of mine who came over for a day. As days passed, I realized that the next two years will be one of the most hectic and taxing period of my life. But I was ready for the juggernaut too. Though there were times when I just wanted to leave everything and go home as I hadn’t been there for the past seven months!
Well, for most of us, summers end around the end of June and so did mine. As I write this, my first term too is closing to an end followed by a week’s mini break. I guess I will finally get to redeem my pending summer vacations!
Sohini Sarkar 