ch-1

It's been 5 months since we last spoke. I was looking forward for months to write you a letter as promised on the fated day in October. To you and other person in your last institute who is still there. Although I promised her in the early days of October before saying that I am okay now. Okay in the sense that I don't want to talk to her anymore, okay in the sense that talking to her often reminds me that I am in a crisis.

but this is not about her...

this is about you and I. We have known each other for almost 2 years now. my first impression of you was that you were blunt and direct. but as time got by and as my psychedelic renaissance (read renai-fail) I got to know many things about myself that I had not realised in my earlier years, I was oblivious.

for example, I remember now that there was a time in my life when I had broken my finger while playing basketball at school, I got the bones relocated, rested for a day, and was back at school the day after for a mathematics unit test. I wanted to approach my math teacher (let's call him David) and ask him if I could skip the exam BUT i couldn't muster the courage to ask. I was standing right beside him and wanted to ask him and he was not facing me (which I realise may have been deliberate) but fear took over so I did not ask.

I sat down in the exam hall and cheated my way through expecting 25 out of 50, enough to save face among my parents and enough to breeze through to the next standard. but a week later when the results came in I had got 35 out of 50. I was surprised! I had not even attempted 35 marks worth of questions! To my surprise, many wrong or unattempted questions had also found a reward in my answer sheet. I thought David had made a mistake but after about 2 seven 7ear cycles around the sun, i realised that it was David who had given me so many extra marks just so I could probably appear in the final exams...

now the question sits.. why? at that time I thought he had been foolish. but now I realise one thing...it was a certain kind of serendipity that I had gotten accustomed to throughout my life. the rank and salutes that were betrothed to my parents were not just limited to the regiments that they were in. They had trickled down to their children as well in the form of a lot of good luck even in the face of certain carelessness and a trivial understanding of the world.

What people often thought was playfulness in me often seemed like a certain level of naivety and non understanding of the world and its realiities. a lot of the social realities only became clear to me after the renaifail where i slowly began understanding that man, i am no one, i understand almost nothing, and the potential that other people have spoken about is only relegating itself to a certain squandering.

anyway, it is this squandering and serendipity that led me to you for the 18-month period we were in contact, week after week. I now realise that the same meaning of our names and same birth dates were something which quite possibly cannot be a mere coincidence. the group of people that you belong to by profession, I can quite explicitly say that you are the first one that caused a real change in me...the earlier cohort led to a twisted understanding of me to me and of me to them. your methods were indeed refreshing.

lfg

some changes...