Reminiscing the old days
I’ve been back in my hometown for about a month now, and during this time I got a chance to go through a lot of old stuff from my childhood. I’m a sucker for nostalgia, so this sort of thing fascinates me. It’s funny how I have completely forgotten multiple events that felt extremely important to me back when I was a kid. But you look back at an old book or find a note you might have written 12 years ago, and it all comes flashing back.
I found an old diary that I used for making study time tables. Going through some of them, I remembered that there was a 2 week period just before the 10th board exams when I was sleeping just 2 hours a day! I had lost a lot of time to chicken pox at the beginning of the school year, and after that, I had gotten addicted to Orkut, an ancient social media website. It was February 2010 when I finally realized that if I wanted to reach my goal of getting a good board result, I would have to do something extreme. Miraculously, it worked, and I got a 9.8 / 10.
The oldest thing I have probably is a small plastic box filled with stones, which I have had for about 15 years. It sounds crazy, I know. In fact, when my dad found it while cleaning a cupboard, he asked me if he could throw them away. When I was young there was a lot of construction going on where I lived. So the streets were always filled with heaps of sands that they used to mix in cement. And one of the pastimes of me and my friend was to look for cool looking colorful stones in that sand. We could easily spend an evening doing that. And then we would go and clean the best of the stones found and add them to our prized collection.
I believe that we become a completely different person every 10 years. If I met 12 year old me, I am sure he wouldn’t like me, and we won’t see eye to eye on anything. Which is why I like to keep this old stuff. These are like fossils, that I can look at from time to time and try to remember how life used to be.