That old “long-notebook”….

Most of us who have written a few things during school or college days, have had that favorite old note book or note pad where we wrote regularly or irregularly….

I have one of those preserved too. It’s the typical long notebook printed by some odd local publisher and titled the book with some typical Indian name like “Kamal Books”, “Vikas long note”, “Saraswati Pustak” or something equally non-attractive (at least to me). Mine doesn’t have a front cover.

But to my happiness, I remember my notebook without the front cover ever since… the first page interestingly is full of the different styles of “signing my name off”! This was a regular hobby with me and my Dad used to be pretty intrigued too. My dad has the most unusual signature I have seen for a simple minded Engineer. So there’s this page with signatures all-over, some with English & Hindi alphabets mixed up to give the whole thing a different look, that happens to be the face of my fav writing pad.

The last page almost mirrors the first one, while the difference is in the directions of the scribbled signatures.

But the essence, obviously is between the two.

It holds some of my fav old poems and articles, I wrote years back. There’s something with nostalgia that makes you feel sentimental. So I keep going back to that note-book and read from it. I haven’t wanted to change or copy stuff from there onto a newer better and beautiful note-book. Something just stops me (It’s become like an artifact for me ).

The other reason of the fondness, probably, is that it belongs to my college time. The era of romanticism, youthful energy and also some solitude. All three of these attributes reflect in all that I wrote at that time – new ventures, homesickness, My Mother, my gang of ‘yet-to-be-engineers’, my crushes, my dreams as a young man, times of dilemma, time itself, solitude and sorrow….

So it’s a mixed bag of some most cherishable times of my life.

Another fact that adds to this is that I spent more than a year in a small village in Assam, exposing myself to a totally different world. Some of the most remembered people (young n old), some of the most lonely nights, some days of bizarre travelling….

All in all, my fav long-book is a drop of rain that takes me back to the Sea, where it came from.