Cleaning up: A Nostalgic Trip

The posters..torn from the walls :(

One of the best ways to relive your old days in school and college is to clean up your old room. Thats what I learned last week. As we were planning to rent the top floor of our home in Trivandrum, we had to do a clean up operation. More precisely, I had to do it because almost the entire floor was filled with my own stuffs. The so called stuffs include things ranging from the LKG alphabet book to the engineering data books. Considering the possibility of classified and 'secret' documents being present in those heaps, I told my mother not to touch any of those. I planned last weekend's trip home just for this cleaning up purpose. And yeah, it was worth it.

a part of the wall..before removing the posters

The minute I opened the big wall shelf, I could sense that dusty old smell. The shelf was full to the brim in 3 compartments. I had to decide what all things to throw and what to keep. Considering the fact that one of my hobbies happens to be 'collection', I was sure the things to throw away won't be much to speak about. The first things I laid my hands on were the notebooks. There were those crazy 4 line english copy books, 2 line malayalam and hindi copy books, homework books, notebooks just to write impositions and rough books. I made it a point to check for hidden pieces of paper. No, I was not looking for any loveletters from my school sweethearts. I was keeping an eye on any crazy notes we used to pass each other in school. I did get some. Also the back pages of notebooks were a treat. Anything from poorly done sketches of the girl in the next bench to nicknames of teachers were seen there. A 7th standard notebook's
backpage was filled with the old 'FLAMES'game, using which you could easily find out whether a particular girl will be your friend, lover, wife, enemy or a partner in bed. And the funniest thing is that most of the girl's name whom I tried out in those pages never even became an acquaintance. Some other notebooks had chocolaty lyrics of boy bands written at the back like "you are my fire(:P)...". The one which takes the cake is a special notebook with pictures from 'titanic' movie pasted in many pages. I was on the point of banging my head on the wall at this 'heights of chocolatiness', when I stumbled on the prize catch- a diary of poems written in school. I started it in 8th standard by writing malayalam poems. There was a poem called 'Ente premam(my love)', reading which made me cry with shame. It was written to impress our
beautiful class magazine editor. All the lines were filled with elaborate descriptions of her beauty, her eyes, her hair, her hands and even her legs(GOD!). Arranging the college notebooks was the easiest part-there were only less than 10 of them for all the 4 years. And most of them filled with heavy metal lyrics, crazy drawings and sometimes the highest of expletives.

Once I got over with notebooks, I proceeded to my precious collection of paper cuttings. It was a hobby which I started way back in school. Amma always told me never to do that because most of the papers couldn't be used for wrapping things once I started my operation. Rifling through those paper cuttings were like reading a mini history text book. There were entire collections of papers during world cups and other important events. Most of Sachin's centuries and Schumi's wins were carefully cut and kept. All the separate categories were kept in separate covers like music, movies, sports, politics. There were crappy cuttings of movie stars which went staright to the dust bin.

All over the wall...

The last part of the cleaning up operation was the painful part-Removing the heavy metal posters in our band's practise room. A collection acquired from years of buying and stealing rock magazines from friends. I carefully cut the cello taped parts so as to use the posters later. At the end of it all, amma was happy. What started with a single poster in the corner of the room, hijacked the whole room and turned it into four black walls of heavy metal Gods in just a few months time. After I removed everything, she was saying, "Ippozhaanu ivide kaattum velichavum vanu thudangiyathu"(Its only now that light and air has started to come into this room). Still, for me, to see that room without the posters, the guitars, the DVDs and that old desktop was a pain. I could easily say that the times spent inside this room were some of the best of my life. Those four walls and that little space in between means a lot to me. Anyway, the whole exercise was an enjoyable one.

your crusader Praveen