Decadent

Sometime in the midst of this month’s bedlam is wrapped a day that would purportedly mark a significant milestone in my life as well as a whole bunch of others who journeyed the same time as me. I am not sure it really is significant enough, but I am raising the bar on it. In some ways, it is as important as a 30th birthday or a five year anniversary at a job: it means something if you want it to. The event I am talking about: completion of ten years since graduation; since I bade goodbye to my alma mater that mattered: SPCE (Sardar Patel College of Engineering). This post won’t be an exercise in reminiscing. There’s just so much history in the days gone by and the place that was that it would be patently unfair to try and summarize that in a few paragraphs. I see flashes of that era littered around me: photographs on Facebook, the college magazines stocked and piled in my house, a quiz club that is still active since its inception when I was in my second year, friends who are a click away, among others. Those hard evidences abound and most likely still will be there for a while to come. There’s enough ammunition to make one misty-eyed and smile into empty spaces when the mind wanders or a song jogs up old memories.

What makes the ten year anniversary significant is that it serves as a good assessment point: step back, look at yourself, look and appraise the universe around you, look back at what you had wanted and where you are with it. Perhaps you could call it the early-mid-life crisis, or an impending reality check. I suppose its a little less pressure when you weren’t marked for greatness, and I say that in the utmost bitter less manner possible. For us, the bar is a fluctuating line that varies from discovering your potential, to fulfilling it; from realizing that some dreams were out of reach, but others are within the grasp of effort and reality; that there’s joy in reveling and marveling at the success of your peers and satisfaction at realizing that you are making a decent impact too. There’s joy in marveling at how you couldn’t have predicted where you’d be in ten years, who you’d be with, and that your best creation till date will be a study in flailing arms and unintelligible warbles. Ultimately, this is an occasion to smile at the glorious uncertainties of life: if you couldn’t predict accurately how the last ten years were going to be, chances are your image of what happens ten years hence will also be imperfect. So, here’s to the class of 1999: toast to yourself and the joy that is life; You’ve done well!