How further into the past can you remember? For me it gets fuzzy as I try and recollect my kindergarten years. And also the time between my 7th and 10th standards. I seem to have forgotten many faces, except for some pretty girls who were classmates for brief periods of time.

My school experience is pretty different indeed. I have not known another school except the school in which I studied, Jeevana, in Madurai. And that is since I was in the same school from KG to XII. People say that antiques are things that one generation uses, the next throws away and the next after that will restore with great care. Similarly, when I got out of school, I never bothered to maintain contact. After all these years I go around hunting people on Orkut, collecting phone numbers and calling unsuspecting, good old days guys.

Today a few of my classmates came visiting. We also managed to call a teacher and another friend as well. It was bliss indeed. Two of them, Meena and Aruna had visited the school a couple of weeks ago, and they vividly described how it now looks different from how it used to be. They told us about many new faces being there and also informed meeting the old time teachers as being fun. Imagine visiting an IT company after like 8 years. I was joking that you wouldn’t find a soul who’d recognise you! Companies with an attrition rate of 20% display it proudly on their web sites and brochures! While for many other “MNCs”, its much more higher at > 30%. Its like saying “We only suck so much. We are so much better than the other guys who suck really bad”.

Reading maketh a man. Thus goes the saying. I say writing maketh a superman.

In the course of my life, I have come across many voracious readers and prolific writers. Reading widens the horizons of knowledge and broadens the mind. But it is writing that helps index thoughts and sharpen senses.

One of the very learned persons I have known is Prof. J.C.B Abraham. He is no more. Known amoung his friends as JCB, he had not set age as a criterion to choose his friends. Here is a fitting tribute to a remarkable man. His house looked more than a library than a regular human habitat. He was sorrounded by books all the while. I was in awe for this person even back when I was a student in school, where he taught me select chapters in Biology. He was a expert in Evolution and Genetics. He was a pofessor in the Zoology department of the American College, Madurai and also served as its Vice Principal once. There are two academic awards for excellence in Evolution and Genetics named after him in The American College.

He was an athiest and we would discuss for hours why our views had to be so different. But this man was a very principled person. I remember an incident very distinctly than many others. To get admission into The American College, I had gathered photocopies of all necessary documents. He had come there for me, to help me in the admission process. At the time when he had to attest the photocopies, he asked me for the originals and I had ofcourse kept them at home. Angry at this, he asked me how a person could ever attest photocopies without the originals. He then sent me home to fetch the originals! I was then not a man of wheels, I had to take a bus and run from the bus stop to my house which was quite a distance. And once I fetched them, he never even cared to look at them. He just attested the papers for me! He just wanted to do things right, thats it.

In Literature, there are many schools of thoughts as to why art exists. There are schools that profess “art for art’s sake” or “art for my sake”, etc. I think this blog is the second category, if this can be considered any form of “art” at all.
But if one has to make a living out of writing, the Internet has opened many doors. One such service is LULU.com. Authors can write books, design a cover and sell it here at this site at a price fixed by them. LULU takes a cut. But since books are printed only against orders, there are less overheads involved. It is a wonderful platform for new authors to take off.