Idiagress

It was a twenty minute walk from my school to my home, in seventh grade my parents got me a cycle tonavigate the same distance. The same distance, the same path, yet my cycle ride was a good sixtyminutes! In my mind nothing was absurd nor was anything inconsistent. Those cycle rides laid thefoundation of digress or as I spell it as 'diagressing'. We had an important check point in our journey, atamarind tree, which needed at least twenty stone shots to dislodge a tamarind from the tree to thethick grass below. Add to this a five minute search in the thick layer of grass and a probability of oversixty percent that the tamarind had already been half eaten by a bird or a squirrel. Still, it felt good, timewell spent, because of friends, the chit chats and the banter. Life is enjoyed in such bits, like Tutti frutti in bun bread. While living these moments, they seem normal, yet while reminiscing them, the absurdities form the joyful parts of the memory. For example, in junior college, Garaware college Pune, during chemistry practicals, the lab peon gaveus a transparent liquid in a small flask and said, "take this dilute hydrocloric acid." We took that flask toour desk, poured it in a petri dish and then put a litmus paper in the dish, the blue litmus turned reddishand we claimed as a conclusion of the whole exercise that the fluid in the flask is 'acidic' in nature. Thelogic of the exercise is beyond cognition, it is not even absurd that we took a good twenty minutes toget to the conclusion, the real absurdity is that we were allotted two and half hours to perform theexperiment!Nostalgia has a way for softening such absurd things, like the fondness nostalgia creates for hoursspend in 'lines'. One hour in a line to get the form 'checked', then another line, another hour to get thesame form 'stamped' and to add to it an another hour in an another snaking line to 'submit' the form. Those lines were excruciating, you wondered why isn't everything at the same counter and done in onego, yet, those lines are full of fond memories, jokes and banter with friends, the thrill of skipping a fewplaces, sneaking in a friend, chai and samosa. The idea is just to collate such memories, and moments. Not just the past, but to collate the digressionsof the mind. Just like after watching a movie you end up doing a google search, the attempt is tocapture that curiosity moment. To create a corner, a repository in this vast information age of ours. Forindulgence in random topics from physics to philosophy. To express and to write for the love writing. So the best summary is that, this is about nothing specific, hopefully something enlightening, something that brings a smile- Vinaay Pat