Written by Mohd Ayan
Edited by Vyakha Vashishth
Illustrated by Parina Ramchandani
We come from worlds that used to revolve around us, to a place much more central and dismissing. The conglomerated stories of college students who are expected to (and in due course do learn to) acclimate rapidly to a shifting paradigm in which there are set hours, rules, rubrics, and chores set out for each and every one of us as dictated by the Adult StandardTM. This is not another take on how the inner child is gentrified, forgone, shunned and restrained, while the reins are taken over by more matured counterparts of the psyche. Rather, this is a personal opportunity for the author and his audience to let the past roam free before our eyes for a brief moment before we receive another assignment deadline or load of laundry which the adult will have to undertake.
This edition of ECHO: Louder for Those in the Back is an effort to reminisce and to pay homage to the journeys we have all made, and a shoutout to all the irrelevant sticks on the ground that became lightsabers and rifles and amazing weapons to conquer the day and the world with. All the shiny rocks we hoarded on our bedside drawers, like exuberant magpies, single handedly throwing hands at the very concept of minimalism.
This is an ode to the experiences contained within skinned knees and sweaty brows as another ball was bowled or another goal scored in the swelteringly awesome evenings of May during the summer vacations we so voraciously waited for. The grandfathers and mothers and uncles who visited us and gave us candies; the “do you have games on your phone?” era of 2G internet connectivity when Temple Run, Need For Speed, and San Andreas reigned galore on our mobile and (uncle’s) desktop screens. This is in personal remembrance to the evenings spent with my brother in our grandfather’s garden atop a stool collecting mulberry fruits (shahtoot) and keeping them in the freezer so they cool down quicker, and then offering them to everyone in the family, beaming smiles all around as they enjoyed the sweetness of the fruit and of our labor.
There’s a whole world of experiences that lie ahead of us, and everyday we hustle in an effort to achieve the best version of these experiences; CIAs to finish sitting in the college canteen with friends, clubs to hit up every weekend, shirts to wash and iron and attendances to keep up. And yes these are our formative years within which we absorb and get irradiated with the ideals of this world of humans, rapidly fading out humanity, washed-out colors on the peeling walls of the world economy, and a rapidly declining population of Monarch Butterflies.
We are all but left to live the human experience, having just run out of the trial period. I do not intend to be optimistic or pessimistic in the takes presented herein, but rather to hopefully inspire a soaring perspective of the life we have lived until this very point, be it today as I write it or multiple years or decades later when this piece of literature is construed for the last time, like a shiny rock tossed into the wide ocean, to sink and never to see light ever again.
That should not be an analogy for our past, though.
Our pasts are a very valuable and irretrievably marvelous facet of our cumulatively singular and unique experiences as we walk the earth once walked by greats like Tagore and Nietzsche and Billy Joel, and the unnamed men and women too.
As the sole creative director of this article I choose not to conclude. For conclusions are derivatives of a train of thoughts red-flagged abruptly and abysmally. Instead, I urge the recipients of this message, derived from the kids in our hearts, to reconnect with their inner child.
Here’s to us.
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