"Thoughts of a
Passing Out XIMBian"
- by Rhiju Bhowmick *
My wing in C-block is empty. All
my friends are leaving one by one. Two years of blood and toil are over. With a
decent job in hand, I should be happy to be able to be finally away from this
grind of B-school. But suddenly, I feel an emptiness that I never thought
existed. All through those sleepless nights spent with droopy eyes stuck on
excel sheets on the comps, we had developed a camaraderie that crept upon us,
unnoticed, uninvited. And suddenly I miss the people, I miss the grind, I miss
the jubilations and the frustrations that have dogged my every step through
these two years at XIMB. The hostel seems deserted. It is like that great
birthday cake, which you had hogged and now the broken crumbs stare at you from
an empty plate. I envy those few lucky souls who have left the campus the very
day the final exams ended. They were spared the pain of seeing a home
disintegrate. They left when everything was still the same, when the parting was
yet to begin.
A junior is playing a Bengali
song on C top-floor. And no, he is not a Bong. He is a Tamilian Brahmin from
Madras. This has happened time and again. XIMB has acted like a gigantic melting
pot where the individual cultures of the students have mingled into a unique
one. We have these dance parties, fondly known as 'JLT's, mainly because one can
never predict when we will be in a mood. We decide and bingo, we have the JLT
tonight! There the devoted Oriya swings to the beat of Punjabi folk songs and
the quintessential Bong sheds his lethargy to shake a leg to a hit Telegu
number. We spoke the same tongue, chilled out in similar ways, had fun in the
network through win-pop (a network messenger service) and marched to the same
tune.
Now the party is over. Time to
get on to the jobs. Time to come out of the classroom. Time to live and time to
die.
XIMB shall stay within me,
ensconced in its pearly cocoon, to be entered into when life becomes a shade
less kind and I miss my friends and the life we had lived.
