Lost
Thursday, February 19, 2009
I got a chance to attend a wedding after a long time. The last wedding before this one was way back in 2000 of my cousin. So when Varun, one of my very good friends from my school days, got married. Many of our teachers who had taught us during our school days were invited.
I was present with many of my friends from school days. We were standing in a group all the schoolmates when our teachers (surprisingly even a prime minister becomes an ex prime minister, a boss becomes an ex boss, even a girlfriend or wife becomes an ex girlfriend or wife. But a teacher always remains a teacher he/she is never an ex teacher may be because you can always learn something from him/her no matter how much you grow)
They saw us came to meet us, and it felt so good. But I had my Eureka moment when our teachers were trying to recognize us. Of course they didn’t remember most of our names (it’s been 10 years since we passed out and they would have taught us like 12-15 years back). My teachers saw me and they were like “Prateek, You were the computer whiz kid”. It felt so good when people who teach 500 students in a year and they remember you after so many years associating you with something which you really cared about. It was such a pleasant surprise that all of them recognized me, not because I was a brilliant student which obviously I never was. But because I had a passion for something and everyone in school knew that. The passion was computers, programming, hardware, software, anything related to technology. I used to bunk the games periods to sit back in the computer room, I know how weird it sounds but that use to be my craze for computer if not till late then at least till class 10th when I got my own personal computer.
I look 10 years down the line I was the whiz kid on the block, a computer champ, a solid programmer. Suddenly I work for one of the most reputed IT companies in the word; I have become an engineer & MBA by qualification and a consultant by designation. But in this whole gamut the passion for the computers stands lost and defeated. The fun of writing a code and see it almost working and then spending nights to debug to finally see it working as it should has dwindled in the glow of corporate ladder and hierarchy.
This is a very incoherent and lost post. Just trying to tell myself how life has changed and things have gone haywire in a meaningless tryst.