One last time.

So I’m in the train now, headed home. One last time. And the feeling has yet to sink in.

These last few days have been very weird, trying to cram in everything on my bucket list, doing all the things I’ve always wanted to do. Friends met, we drank, talked and made merry as if there was no tomorrow. But there sadly is a tomorrow. A tomorrow where our days do not start at 12 noon, when days and nights will no longer melt into one for submissions, where maggi will not be available 24 hours a day at different parts of the campus, where you cant always find company to get high and bitch about profs, girls, friends, enemies, life, the universe, and everything. There will be no more asking rickshawallas to let you ride the rickshaw just so you can act macho (in the outside world that is enough to get you labeled a weirdo. Sucks ), no more fighting with the Vegies Dada when he gives you 8 eclairs instead of 8 rupees change, no more midnight 2.2s, no more drunken nights on Lallu top, no more tempo shouts in Netaji, at TSC, the basketball court, or just about anywhere, no more GC madness, no more dereg heart attacks, no more chai-sutta at Bhasky, no more sunrises at Shankarpur, no more.

Today life as I have known for the past five years, and probably the best phase of my existence so far, comes to an end. There is of course the faint hope that I will go back, and relive some of these moments once more, but that prospect is too far in the future for it to have any bearing on what I feel now.

KGP has been very forgiving to all of us who slogged through JEE 05 (the last REAL JEE , yeah F U 4th years ), and cursed their luck the moment they stepped off the train and onto the erstwhile longest platform in the world. All we were told about life inside those gates was that we should, theoretically, be involved in academic activities. Now we know how wrong that was. Life on campus has changed all of us, more than we would have believed possible. All of us have made mistakes here, some of us really really, f-ed up. But here, in these secluded environs, we have been given second, and third, and fourth chances. Maybe its just that we _are_ sort of stuck in a time warp here. But we can be sure of one thing, life outside Puri gate is a bitch. There will be no more second and third chances, and the knowledge that we have already screwed up more over here than we could have imagined, is a big part of what we take away from KGP.

To all those who I have not said this: I will miss KGP and all of you. I can only hope that our paths cross sometime in the future, and the 10 hours that we talk about our years here, turn out to be too less to express what we feel about KGP. It is not a five years easily forgotten.

“Dada, station jaana hai”. One last time.