Nostalgia is a sweet ailment. Only twisted minds savor the bitter-sweet taste of the past. But, sometimes, it is all you can do. Especially, when you get to stay in your hometown again!
Staying in this idyllic city of Nangal made my childhood an extraordinary experience.
But, I didn’t know it at that time. I was busy daydreaming about the “perfect adult life”.
Yet, I still had moments of absolute calm and happiness:
an adventurous hike to the school, cycling around the beautiful town lined by the gigantic river Satluj, the hospital nearby where we played hide and seek (maternity ward is the safest spot!), a passionate Biology teacher who took us to multiple bio-hikes - he identified the name of each and every plant in the town and beyond.
And most importantly, we had a teacher of English literature who didn’t just read poetry.
He savoured every word of a poem, created a big spectacle out of it, and made us fall in love with English literature every single day.
I remember a poem that he narrated to us. It felt like the poem was the only thing that mattered at that moment.
The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes:
“The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees. The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, And the highwayman came riding— …”
“The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor” has stayed with me for longer than I imagined. But the best was yet to come;
“One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I’m after a prize to-night,"
I can still hear the suppressed giggling of my classmates when he decided to blow a kiss dramatically!
"But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light; Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day, Then look for me by moonlight, Watch for me by moonlight, I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way.”
I guess that’s what nostalgia is all about. Many of my classmates have gone ahead and become engineers and doctors. Yet I still find myself there, sitting in that class over and over again: awestruck, giggling, trying to memorize every single word in the “Oxford dictionary” and falling in love with poetry as we know it. :)
The epic movie Dead Poets Society is as close as it can get to the kind of passionate childhood we experienced. Sir Prasad to me, is an epitome of the art of teaching, and in his own ways, he clearly conveyed the “secret” to those of us who were listening;
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute.
We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.
And the human race is filled with passion.
And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
“To quote from Whitman, ‘O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?"
Answer. That you are here — that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.
What will your verse be?”
The question is still relevant,
“What will your verse be?” 🙂
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