Re-unions

A few weeks ago, we had a reunion of all my batch-mates from my engineering college days. It was a silver jubilee reunion, a quarter century after we all left the Institute and went our varied ways. I could not miss it for anything. I have learnt my lesson many times, I missed my convocation after my MBA because I was busy with something, I missed a vacation with my family because I was too tied up at work and these are regrets that one cannot do anything about, and it sends pangs of anguish even after many years. So I decided that I will not let this one slip and thanks to another friend of mine who was more enthusiastic, everything was booked and planned a month in advance.

I have to admit that the reunion it self was more magical than I had anticipated. There is something about your undergraduate days, the friendship and the bonds that you create during those years last for ever and are much stronger than any that you build anytime after. Many of us observed this and many of us wondered why this so.

I feel that these are the days when you first leave the safe and familiar surroundings of home, you are at that age when you are really transforming from an adolescent to being an adult, and most important of all, you have very little baggage. You meet others who are in the same boat with the same spunky confidence of the youth, with no constraints in what you dream to be, having similar challenges and interests. During those formative years, all of us see the other transforming into a man or woman with lot more pragmatism and focus. We enter the university with ninety percent idealism and ten percent responsibility and we all leave with at best 30% idealism and 70% responsibility. The fact that each of us witnessed the others transformation, makes us feel that there is nothing to hide from each other. Like my friend said, we have seen each other bereft of any layers of cloak in more ways than one!

The fact that after two and half decades when we all met, we could somehow recreate the same feeling of "baggage-less" interaction, was perhaps the most rewarding of experiences. For once you were not a CEO or CIO or CFO ("FO to all that" as one of them put it!) but you were you. I believe that it is this sense of freedom that was so refreshing and genuine about the reunion and I really treasure that.