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The Bright And Beautiful Side Of The Social Media

( words)
*For representational purpose only.
School days mean different things to different people. For most, it is the best time of our lives. Stories from this period of life stay with us forever.

Crushes, affairs, successes, failures – even the sleazy secrets of puberty and other unscrupulous things – are always fresh in our memories. The hostellers have more stories than day scholars. And these stories, for an incorrigible raconteur like me, are a staple fodder for thought.

I have been out of YPS Patiala for two decades but I still churn school stories out of my escritoire at the wink of an eye. It seems like just the other day when I landed there on an April morning in 1988. Sitting on the iron trunk that got a dent when someone jumped on it while it was kept near the toilet in a sleeper coach of Punjab Mail, I looked listlessly on motormouths in skirts, wondering if I would ever be able to blabber like them – in English. For someone who had studied in a Hindi medium school before landing in Patiala, that seemed like a difficult feat.

Without sounding pompous, I can dare say that I worked hard on the language, and by the time I was in class 10, I was writing the mandatory inland letter (given every Sunday) in English. Those were also the days of making pen pals. I would pick addresses (of girls) from a magazine and would shoot as many letters as possible, all with the same content.

That was the time when my romance with letters – and English – had begun. It only blossomed with each passing year.

After I passed out in 1994 and returned to my native city Lucknow, it was a daily routine for me to visit the nearest post office every afternoon to check if it had a letter for me. My YPS friends didn’t disappoint me even once. For the initial few months, there would be more than one. Six to eight pages of what it now seems "poppycock" – a senseless fantasy about girls, from school, films, sports arena, and sometimes even teachers, peppered with nostalgia. There would be a competition amongst us to write more pages than the other.

Archies and Hallmark cards would only make the envelope fatter.

Those were not the days of satellite television invasion into our drawing rooms, and The Bold and the Beautiful and MTV were limited to the metros. Those were also not the days when it was "cool" for school children to smoke and drink beer.

Gradually, there was a downtick as all of us got busy with college admissions and found new friends. In the following years, school memories got relegates and email replaced letters. And then the social media arrived – Ryze, Orkut, Facebook, and Twitter. School friends were discovered, connections established and mobile numbers exchanged. Sepia-toned, dog-eared pictures were pulled out from school albums and shared along with interesting anecdotes. In the comments box, stories began to roll out.

And there, there. The school has sprung back into our lives – minus the envelopes.

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