An old DVD and a ton of delight!

It’s an overload, these memories. They just come. They seem to have a mind, a whimsical nature of their own. Having befuddled my mind with the unfathomable sociological theories thus far, I sat down to write some stuff. Stuff, eh? That settles it. I seem to have lost it.

Anyway, we shall continue with our endeavour. There’s no harm in trying.

Was a normal evening, until I brought out my data DVD that I had made back in March. That was when my system was ravaged by ‘New Folder.exe’(that bastardly worm) and all hell had broken loose. The internet connectivity was shot, so were all the system utilities. Couldn’t just say the magic (??!!) words “Format the HDD” before contemplating how much of my valuable data would be lost. So I sat about the task of cramming all the important bits of info to a single 4.7 GB DVD. Wanted to see how adept I was at separating the necessary from the unnecessary, the grain from the chaff.

Turned out it wasn’t such a big deal at all. The music files were not important, as I had most of my music on other media. Just some select songs (worth about a GB) were transferred to the DVD.

EBooks. Oh well…they were even more important. There were around 400 novels in the form of word and pdf files. They went in too.

Then came the images. Most of the images were wallpapers of various automotive works of art. Important. Very important. In they went. I then came to the digicam images. And I had crammed them in, without another thought.

Cut to this particular afternoon, the 22nd of November, 2008. I slotted the DVD into the PC for the music, but ended up spending the better part of the evening trying to relive the golden ’07 days. The cricket match at Cuttack, Holi, the Party in June, then the shots of our last three days at SPS…No, it wasn’t a walk down memory lane…It was a BLAST down the memory freeway!!!

One movie file had me in splits. The usual stars of the show were Niladri, Shubhrapratim, and to a certain extent, Souvik. Some quotes of these iconic characters have been preserved on digital media for posterity:

Mainak: Hey, ami padini!
Niladri (echoing Mainak’s sentiments): Ami shotti padini…ami padle tui ekhane thaktish na!!!

Shubhrapratim: Aajkal Souvik er asholey ‘ling parivartan’ er symptoms dekhachche…
Souvik: Babai ke dekhachchi.
Niladri (jumps like a feral beast on Shubhra): Mujhe cheer, mujhe cheer!!!
Souvik (joins in): Aare Babai…
Niladri: Dara…toke dekhachchi…aaj tor ling change kore toke bari pathabo…
Mainak: Tumi pechhone takate paro…drama korte hobe…
Souvik (interrupts): Please…Let me help.
Mainak: E ki re??!!
Shubhrapratim cries in anguish owing to the torture…and we collectively laugh our heads off.

I ended up laughing loudly in the solitary confines of my room. People outside must have thought I had gone nuts. They weren’t very far off.

After replaying the clip for god-knows-how-many-times, I sat back with my eyes closed. And not much was left, except for the sepulchral hush that descended on my thoughts. If anything, I was happily looking forward to the December of 2008. Not the Chennai shorts-and-t-shirts winter with the warm, even hot sunshine, but a proper quilt-muffler-jacket-mittens-thermocot winter with dense fogs and starry nights.

Bring it on!!!