THE iNFINITY: The Moving Chronicles

For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

-Bible (Old Testament)

Part IV

continued from Part III

It was about the same time four years back that I receieved my rank sheet for the JUIT entrance test. It said I was eligible for counselling and had to be present in flesh and blood (the pun is intended, indeed.) on the given date. That started a heated round of arguments at home.

Having spent about four years at Shimla prior to this, I obviously didn't want to go back to a place I thought I had left for good. But then, I hadn't done too well in any of my other competitive exams and I still wanted to be an engineer. And as Papa put it, "Beggars can't afford to be choosers".

In about a month, I was trying to make myself feel at home at JUIT, Waknaghat. [yeah queerly named location for a college you'd say, and I agree...]

More or less, the four years passed about in a jify. And for all their memorable moments, I'd probably like to forget the four years as fast as I lived them. Living in the moment was one of the better lessons that college probably taught me.

I passed out of JUIT a week ago. (yeah! I'm an engineer finally, and the grades weren't all that bad :P) Tomorrow I leave Shimla, JUIT, the hills and all the memories far behind as I move to, what I'd like to believe are, greener pastures. And though I've never quite liked the hills as a place to live - you need to walk a lot (and yet you don't sweat!), the weather changes like girls's prefernces, life's slow, a bit too slow for my liking, and to admit it, I find driving here hell lotta difficult, there's just a bit of nostalgia that I can already feel.

But, for all my reasons for being disenchanted with the hills, living here during the past eight years made me realise something really important... - if there's somewhere that I belong, it's here.

And as Ruskin Bond put it in one of his stories that I read in one of my C.B.S.E. books - "Once you've lived in the hills at some point in your life, you come to belong to them, and wherever you go, your heart keeps tellling you to go back to them."

Until the hill dweller or Pahadiya in me makes me come back one day... it's a sweet bye bye to the Hills.

For now, it's Destination Mumbai!

Concluded.

Listening to: Here Without You, 3 Doors Down

Dedicated to: Shimla. They call it The Queen of Hills...

P.S. This happens to be my One Hundredth Post. Something I had in mind when I began with THE iNFINITY a year back. Bit busy packing right now, so celebrations later... cyao.