Bored but not quite so!
Sitting on a sunday afternoon, in a small library overlooking the rhine, juggling between the explorer windows for unfinished assignments and online games, it is but abvious that random thoughts are having a field day in the obscure corners of the brains. From the highly practical problems of a non disposable toilet paper that conservea trees to much more existensial multilemmas, the imagination was working overtime to satiate me, myself and my boredom. Well if one has to be entirely honest, then i would not have called it boredom but for the lack of a better word and limitations of my own vocabulary. So there I was bored and not yet so.
Rhine is nowadsays foggy. It is foggy in the afternoons too. It is in these foggy afternoons as i amuse by boredom by juggling between the explorer window, rhine also amuses itself by a little game. It disappears. Beneath the translucent sheet of fog it vanished. Leaving by its banks a green path and a road. Looking though the window in the small library it is the edge of the world. Years of education of geography and physics take a backseat as my eyes are convinced that beyond the road outside my window there is nothing. Just white fog. Surprisingly though it is not an unpleasant thought. Sitting there just before the nothingness, as i tell myself that i have reached the edge of the world, i feel i have arrived somewhere. A very satisfying feeling to have when you are twnety three and are spending a sunday afternoon juggling between explorer windows. The only thing breaking the intenstiy of that feeling were the cars that were speeding on the famous German autobahn. Fast at the edge of the world. It was both frightening and wonderous.
Though this was not as wonderous as when out of the nothingness that seemed to be occupying the space wher rhine was materialized a man on a horse. A man on a horse! A horse with a light brown coat that would have probably blended in with other horses easily had there been other horses. However there were no other hosrse and that made the horse that had nothing extraordinary about itself as an extraordinary horse, a fact that had not escaped the knowledge ofthe horse and was clearly evident in the sheer pride of his canter. The horse moved easily and slowly. And it was not slow like the movies where a slow motion shot of a horse in a large field makes you want to go and run out. It was slow like when you know that someone was watching you because at that momemnt you were the thing to be watched. The man riding him was wearing cowboy hat, and had it been a was unihabited landscape the two would have made a good shot for a Marlboro ad. But there they were, on the green with a road with zipping cars on one side and a rhine with nothingness on the other side. It was inspirational. As i watched them with ease at the stage when you know that you are inspired but are on the cusp of finding what that inspiration for, a car zipped by. The sun appeared above the mist, the rhine bored by its games started going back to its palce and the horse and the man rode out of the sight.
I reverted back to juggling the explorer windows and getting bored but not quite so.
Galaxy - A mere competition
Chapter 1
For a long time I have been considering writing about Galaxy. The commonplace excuses of lack of time or inherent lazyness however do not explain why i have not yet written about it. It was the sheer enormity of the task that was daunting me. What right do i have to write about something that combines the passions of thirty years of batches? Just because i was there once, does not make mean that i know what it is all about. I would always end up misrepresenting it in some way or other, for galaxy was never separated from controversy. Is it even possible to write about galaxy without undermining it? Once i got tired of these I came up with a new set of arguements. Just as somethings get spoilt by a touch, or by a look, some things get spoiled by words. Words can never describe galaxy. The essence of galaxy prohibits it from being written about. However beneath all these arguements was the simple truth. I did not have enough faith in my ability as a write to write about it....
I still do not...
Yet i write about it today in the hope that someday, someone who understood galaxy better than me and was a better writer would read this and write about galaxy. In a way i guess it is my attempt to be assocaited with the insignificant history of an insignificant event. Galaxy as we knew it has ended and yet this is not an obituary or an eulogy.
Eight days; twenty four hours non stop; events from drama, debate, art, music and dance to cultural shows, parades to unique events as publicity events, backdrop making; over 1000 participants and in the end two hostels with years of rivalry between them fighiting it out for the coveted shield.
If you have not seen galaxy or even if you have seen it but you have not been a part of it then the above mentioned description will suffice. Maybe i can add in a few more words here and there and stretch it into a paragraph and the namybe you will end up remarking in some conversation some where that yes you heard about an event in IIT Kanpur and it is supposed to be great. That would be an easy thing to do, and i can get away with less words if i do that. However this piece might have some readers who are from IIT Kanpur, and of those some would have seen it happening, and of those some would have been part of it. And they know that the three line definition is jsut a label, it says nothing about Galaxy , and they would know that i know this too and yet i all i wrote was those three lines.
So i must go on and write more....
