Bottle Green and Grey

While writing this article, one thing I have realized:

'Challenge lies in understanding things, but greater challenge lies in creating things worth understanding.'

Seated in front of the monitor with a blank notepad page, my mind wanders, wondering what to write. I bring to mind things I have known, things I have forgotten, memories driven away, banished to the darkest corners of the brain. 

I embark on the task of brushing the soiled memory, sweep the dust mound and revisit in my mind the days gone by.

It's been years now and I have changed; self oblivious of slight changes that resulted in this transformation. The dripping drops of oil from thick black hair, neatly parted, have given way to tangled dry long hair.

Gone are the shiny pair of black Bata shoes. The rigors of a school life have vanished and so have the little joys. Somewhere within that two-storeyed white building, I have lost something of prime value. 

Now that I reflect deeply, I know what it is. It’s the joy, the little joy of hearing yourself laugh without having to worry for what lies ahead.

Like any other child, I always hated the idea of school. Having to carry a bagful of books, being fed with thoughts and ideas that were beyond my comprehension. Having had to commit to memory those long narratives and those senseless poems.

Eyeing those college kids in funky dresses making their way to college with nothing but a sheet of paper tucked inside their denim pockets, I envied them, never for once realizing if any of them would envy me back in return.

Now, as I walk down the lanes of nostalgia, strange thoughts emerge. It's definitely my friends whom I miss the most, but surprisingly enough I miss my teachers too. I miss the feeling of being incarcerated in a white shirt beneath a bottle green sweater, a pair of yellow stripes on its borders, strangled by a tie of the same hues, while a pair of grey trousers preserved my modesty.

Life has been a learning experience; an odyssey to meet my destiny. I have had rich experiences ever since I left my school. My confrontations with life and reality have bestowed me with a different philosophy, but I can never deny, what I am now is also because of what I had learnt in that school of mine. It shaped and molded me, hardened me in its fire, and enabled me to hold whatever ideas and philosophies I may be holding now.

Perhaps the day I marched out of the school for the last time, I must have felt exultation, with barriers breaking, shackles shattering. I must have felt a deep sense of independence, something I must have yearned for long. Perhaps a sense of freedom to let my wings spread and take flight. Regardless of how the feelings must have been, today I know for certain that a part of me was forever coated in bottle green and grey.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe stated, "age does not make us children, as men tell, it merely finds us children still at heart."

Although I haven't aged considerably (my hair yet to grey) and am very much in my prime, I still hear, somewhere from deep down in my chest, echoes of that boy in bottle green and grey, hopefully still remembered within the hallowed walls of Laban Bengalee Boys’ Higher Secondary School.

Afterthought: Isn't it wonderful to think how all the findings of humanity, all great stories, ideas and thoughts can be narrated on a keyboard and yet you fail miserably to paint your core emotions in words on the same keyboard? Giving expressions to your emotions is such a tough job. And, writing apps have definitely saved a lot of trees from being felled.