The arrival of my negative balance dues slip from Pilani has been the most unpleasant among the banal reminders of my graduation.

This post is not going to be written in that endearing BITSian shortcut to posterity- the comma-separated memory format or plainly, “acknows”, the way one of my batch mates has. But six months in an environment as different from Pilani as possible has if anything thickened the nostalgia soup that I’m wading out of.

My leave taking from LatentView Analytics might not have been as scarring as my last week at Pilani was, but it was every bit as ceremonious and complete as the latter was
-Right from composing thank you cards to my bosses, hoping that I didn’t mix up the cards the way I had switched their names in a rather disastrous internal email from my first week, to dropping an expensive chocolate bomb at office, to the retirement party-esque gesture of a fast track watch that’s ticking away on my wrist right now (believe me, this is the first watch I’ve ever owned). The feebleness of these resemblances didn’t deter me from reliving the 13th of December and strangely this has had a curative effect.

PS at LatentView was catharitic and I will never thank it enough for allowing me to acknowledge that the ambitions that I’d professed were ghosts of a PS Senior past and for giving me he reasons to go back to what I really wanted.

“How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.
Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?
Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache.
It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.
Nor is it a thought I leave behind me, but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst.
Yet I cannot tarry longer.
The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark.
For to stay, though the hours burn in the night, is to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mould.
Fain would I take with me all that is here. But how shall I?
A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that give it wings. Alone must it seek the ether.
And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun.
Sons of my ancient mother, you riders of the tides,
How often have you sailed in my dreams. And now you come in my awakening, which is my deeper dream.
Ready am I to go, and my eagerness with sails full set awaits the wind.
Only another breath will I breathe in this still air, only another loving look cast backward,
Then I shall stand among you, a seafarer among seafarers.
And you, vast sea, sleepless mother,
Who alone are peace and freedom to the river and the stream,
Only another winding will this stream make, only another murmur in this glade,
And then shall I come to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean."
Thanks to Ranjani, for a book that opened right away to these verses the day I got done with PS. And I seldom use the phrase “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”