Went through the old trunk from Ahmedabad, locked up in it & stored away is all my stuff from my Post graduate school days, except for clothes of course. A flimsy aluminium affair battered in transport - remember paying the courier company quite some money for it, some thing like 2 grand, 6 years back. My father tried convincing me there really couldn't be stuff worth that money.
Am glad I got it though.....found things from the time....dates cards from amit, project documentations, photographs, braiding samples, leather bits, large cartridge sketches.
Some of it rather pathetic, badly broken & repeatedly mended bits of ceramic,tiny bottles, wooden toys, glass paper weights & ceramic beads, all bought from the sunday flea market or the cart outside the campus, by the main gate.My attempts at decorating my tiny bedside space in a budget.
There wasnt too much money, my father was then a retired bank employee with a few export clients to add to the income.
I lived in the hostel & ate in the mess, which though not as luxurious as today was still good food 3 times a day, & you paid for it all right in the beginning of the semester, which menat you had to pay nothing for the rest of the six months.So living there was not really expensive, in fact you could go through a week without any money, borrowing small sums from friends to buy stationary or the occassional tea.
Found in the trunk were also some sketches from Naik,our drawing faculty, gifts some of them, some just things he did to demonstrate. He must be old now, may be seventy, may be a bit less. he was a bachelor,an old MSU graduate, sculptor & artist, often commissioned by the government of Gujarat & other private organisations.the only things from it that probably is of any real value in the pecuniary sense.
pecuniary considerations aside the box is a door to the past, to the happy carefree youth where choices that define life were yet to be made, where anything was possible
