Boy I'm Old!

Again a trip home, again lots of time to contemplate about everything. Although this time my reverie was broken intermittently by Three Men in a Boat and Nature in her full glory after the monsoons.
I could go on rambling about the serenity of cranes wading through emerald green paddy fields, the sharpness of the features of an absolutely perfect blue-green kingfisher on a telegraph pole. But then again these things are better expressed by a poet or a photographer.
Ah! The book. I think hype killed the book for me. Hype and the British sense of humour which somehow escapes me completely. Otherwise it is quite a decent read(people might feel that I have grossly underrated the book, but the again, to each his own)
Ya the point of this blog is not to give an account of the trip from Bhubaneswar to Kgp on Dhauli express(I'll write about it when its time to say goodbye to Kgp and I make my final Dhauli Express trip). The point is detailed in the following paragraphs.

Just as I had settled down with my book, a teenage guy(first of all it surprises me that I'm not one of them anymore!) opened a Elements of Co-ordinate Geometry by S.L.Loney and started underlining certain sections of it. It wasn't difficult for me to understand his motivation for doing so, so I smiled to myself and buried my face in the book(something tells me the build up I've made up might well end up disappointing the reader so please drop any expectations of a particularly fitting ending). Soon light conversation followed, initiated by him, and soon inevitably. much to my resistance. it came out that I was indeed an IITian. To which he asked "which batch" and lowering my voice a wee bit I said "I appeared JEE in 2001". The guy rolled up his eyes and said "that's five years ago!". On which I did a slight mental calculation, when I came to Kgp, this guy would have been in class 7. Class 7!!! Can you imagine that. Class 7 for God's sake. I don't have words to express how I felt. Except that I never felt older in my whole life. Thats it, don't say I dissapointed you , you had been warned.