IT’S ‘CAT’ DAY
By Neel Anil Panicker
Cradled and cocooned. That’s what Vineet felt in winter’s welcoming arms.
He had set the alarm at five and had got up just after the third ring; his mind a step ahead of his body which still was in sleep mode.
Strange how the seasons and our perspectives of it change with time.
As a child and well into his late teens he remembered snuggling up in bed all through the cold Delhi mornings, his mind lost to sweet dreams, sleep induced deep explorations into a distant land of fantasies that was teeming with angels, a never ending fantastical journey into the unknown, a sepia tinged wish filled comatose state of mind, something from which he wished would continue for ever, that he would never ever have to wake up from.
But that was then when dreams were young and life fairly innocent.
Now, especially so in the last couple of years, young Vineet’s dreams had been rudely smashed to smithereens and he had crash landed on terra firma, harshly brought down to earth.
Mercilessly left to confront and brave the everyday vicissitudes that life hands out to students all over the world.
Studies and more rounds of studies, endless hours of poring into copious tomes, juggling multiple subjects, battling and surmounting one gargantuan mathematical theorem over the other, delving and diving deep into one arcane, even esoteric philosophical musing after another, mugging up idioms and phrases and mastering the syntactical intricacies of the eternally perplexing English Grammar___these and other Herculean obstacles ate up his wintry mornings making all those dreamy memories of sleeping through chilly wintry mornings just that__ a long forgotten distant dream.
For an instant his mind turned a child of ten and he half turned towards his room to snuggle in under the warm sheets.
It was then that he heard his father’s thick baritone smashing into his ears like an overloaded DTC bus on Delhi’s maddening ‘busier than a bumble bee’ streets_ “Vinu, don’t forget to take your Admit Card. It’s the most important day of your life. It’s CAT day”.
He already started feeling like a mouse.
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