Often wondered on many previous New Year eves-why is it that we always show a great zeal in welcoming the New Year as we simultaneously neglect the year that goes by. We often talk about New Year resolutions but do we ever look back to see if we fulfilled any of those resolutions which we took the same day a year ago?
This time around, the New Year is a little more special than usual. Because it is the beginning of a new decade. Or rather, I would say, it is the end of a powerful one.
The past decade is something that “revolutionized” the me in myself. I distinctly remember those days of the late 1990s and early 2000s. That was a time when I used to be a regular reader of Tinkle Digest (must admit it’s something I do even now!!!). The “thickest” books I ever read were those of Enid Blyton – Famous Five and Secret Seven series. The few things I knew about a computer was to use MS DOS, Paint, MS PowerPoint and a few games. And for me, life was all home, school and my dad's college. And home, school and dad's college was life.
The past decade also infused in me a lot of thoughts and ideologies, the most important one being communism. I was influenced by communism and I believe this happened because I went through a lot of communist-based literature at an age when I was not very much in a position to take decisions.
Terrorism,Twitter,Google,Transistors,Tsunami-all these were words unknown at the dawn of the millennium. In fact, a lot of these were unknown to me until the latter half of the decade. Also this decade has the speciality that I started my tryst with the world of competitive examinations. Something which I am not entirely in favour of till date.
I don’t know if I am a changed person as compared to what I was ten years ago, but certainly I like myself the way I did then. I started the habit of reading, a very good habit at that. Mainly fiction novels, but I don’t mind the occasional philosophy as well. While in primary sections, I had the habit of writing regularly. But that habit became intermittent as I looked upon people and incidents to make me write. Another change that was brought about was the writing style. I started writing fewer poems and more prose as compared with the opposite trend earlier. And also I started writing in my mother tongue in this decade. And I still find it way more hard to write in Malayalam than in English, something I wish to rectify with time. Reading particularly news magazines and soccer world cup history was something I picked up in the early part of this decade.
This is a decade when I started taking resolutions. And stopped the practice as well. But one resolution which I took somewhere in the middle of the decade, possibly 2004 or 2005 is something I very strictly adhere to, even till date. That I will not miss the chance to sing my national anthem anytime. And I make it a point to go to any function that has the national anthem in its agenda as much as possible.
Another set of memories of the gone-by decade would be the life in college. College life is something that influences everybody, me being no exception. All those (un)successful mass bunks, those sleepy lectures from the last bench, night outs at hostels, delivery (and in unfortunate cases, the recipt as well) of GPLs, night walks through the college campus-every moment had a special charm. Remember someone saying that how he wished he was born on February 29 so that he would’ve had to bear only one GPL in his college life! And it is this decade that gave me all these.
Oops. I nearly missed out. 2000 is the last year I studied Hindi officially!! It was in mid 2000 that I attempted to read Munshi Prem Chand’s Godaan. Remember flipping through around 35-40 pages with persistent hard work. After that the book went back to the school library shelves.
I don’t know what prompted me to write this article. But I regret the fact that I didn’t write anything this day 10 years ago and I might not want to regret the same mistake when India and the world awake to 2020. I never imagined that I would be here 10 years before and I do think that I can repeat the same statement a decade ahead. Maybe a few years down the lane, I might look back on this article. And smile.
Maybe that’s what I write this for.
Maybe.
Adieu a powerful decade.
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