First words...

Browsing through some of the CDs that I brought from India, I found a very special file....

Around the same time 2 years back... I was feverishly preparing for my GRE... After many attempts at writing a perfectly-gramatical-error-free essay, I had realised that I was not cut for it..

The outcome.... first words... not from the top of my head... but from the bottom of my heart...
Eveningstroll.txt
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"My day was infernal. I never know why i felt so despondent and this was not the first time in these few months i'm feeling so. Worried about the future ? Exam tension ? General discontentment ? I always used to attribute my being worried to any of these but today i couldn't figure out why !! Maybe it was all put together.

I felt so claustrophobic and irritated with myself that i put on my sandals and started walking. No idea where I was heading to, didn't bother to think of that either... I let my feet carry me and once out of my apartments i realised its been years since i walked on these roads. The pace of life has forced me to always take a faster mode of communication but today i had nothing to lose, no time to keep and no destination to reach.

Future, exams, books and a lot of other things haunted me and i was jolted back to consciousness by a child's scream. Turned back to see how the helpless poor limping dog that was equally scared of the kid was darting the exact opposite direction as that of the kid. I gave myself the luxury of a small smile at the kid who had now ensconced himself in his mother's lap. I wondered where I was and I recognised the familiar buildings that had fostered me for a decade.

My school...... I kept staring at it for quite sometime and was quite thrilled at those pictures that popped across my face. It was like a ride back the time machine..... There in the same ground I saw myself with sweat dripping in my face.. The shirt doing what a handkerchief is generally expected to do... Those small khaki shorts... The shoe, supposedly black, soiled beyond recognition.. A spate of thoughts... The corpulent girl i fought with for equal space, in the bench i shared with her... The feel of neglect when i used to wait for hours for just being allowed to play one game of TT... The excruciating pain when the tree i was sitting on gave way for a quick return to the ground.. The temporary loss of consciousness when i was knocked off my cycle by the car passing through my school... The insult i felt when the principal gave me a tight slap for my innovative use of sticks as swords... The humiliation i felt when the teacher made me realise that i was an "out-standing" student... Those visceral feelings wearing my glasses to school for the first time... The feeling of a loser when i was asked to skip the march past on the final day for which i had tanned myself for more than a month, the reason being as trivial as me coming 10 minutes late.... the place where i wept for having lost a game of chess....

I was already beaming at those notalgic feelings.. I noticed it was getting dark and i had spent quite sometime over there.. I walked past the mosaic and could see myself in its reflection... My six foot stature made me look a lot stronger now than then. I strolled back towards home but now with a smile spread across my face...

I took the route that i usually walk back from school... the pebbles i used to kick all the way were still tempting me... I felt like knocking the mangoes off the tree on the way back.... I saw this old lady carrying flowers and she returned the smile that now was fixed on my face..

Back inside my own apartments I was recollecting those jejune moments of life. The pain, neglect, agony, insults, tears seemed to tickle my funny bone now.. Did all those trivial issues make me feel so bad then ? I smiled again... this time not with reminiscence of the past but with the realisation that this same logic could be applied to the present... My woes are definitely not worth brooding over....

Another kids' scream in my apartments jolted me back to consciousness.... i was reminded of the kid near my school and wondered "how different am i from him ??"

Trekked a few places and written so many pages of technical matter... But this evening stroll and penning of mine seems to be a class apart... MY DAY IS MADE... "
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Wrote it.. Reread it.. liked it MUCH more than many perfectly grammatical essays I've ever read.. Probably why the 5 on 6 in my GRE essay writing didn't bother me as much as it would have generally.... If I was bad, it didn't matter anymore....