One step at a time...

When you are travelling by a vehicle, you miss a lot of unimportant things. Everyday, you zoom by on the same roads you take everyday. You take a lot of things for granted. The pavement, the signals, the little shops lining the roads, and of course the people.

Try taking a walk on the same road. You will be amazed at the amount of things you notice and remember. Yesterday, I took a walk down one of the most popular roads in my city. I started at one end, and went down the entire length of the road. it was a route that i must have traveled a million times, especially since I studied for two years in a very famous college on the same road.

The walk brought back some great memories.I walked past the bookstore, where I had bought all my school books,for 10 years straight. I remembered coming there in the rain, dashing from the car to the safety of the shop. Passing on the list to the same person who used to be there year after year. I remembered the distinct smell of the newly opened text books. Wrapping them in bags and running to the car, hoping them stay dry. I looked up at the shop now. It had a strange, new name and a couple of youngsters standing outside were smoking. I walked on.


A few hundred feet later, I passed the coffee shop, and I remembered being there the first day it had opened. I was in the long queue, jostling amongst the crowd. Coffee was 25 Rs a cup, a significant dent in the weekly savings in those days. After we had managed a table, I remember the smirks on our faces, looking at the surging crowd below. We were there, we had made it. As I passed it, there were just a few tables occupied and the window panes looked as if they hadnt been washed for weeks. Of course, there were at least 2 such coffee shops on every road now. I somehow didnt feel like going in.

A little later I reached the main gate of my college. It was a late hour of the day and there was no sign of life. I remembered vividly walking in through that very gate for the first time in 1997. I didn't know at that point, that the next two years inside that gate would change my life forever.

As I walked back home, I thought about how all these places had changed so much. About why some things couldn't stay exactly the way you remembered them. I wondered why change was so inevitable.

I didn't have the answers. But I was glad I had taken that walk.