The MCC 89 Rendezvous - Bangalore Chapter !!!!!

When old friends meet, time flies like it does nowhere else…………….Once again I experienced it yesterday in Bangalore, when a few of us from the batch of PDC 89, Malabar Christian College (MCC) met for a lunch. The lunch itself was the outcome of a whatsapp group we have got going. Though a few of us have been in touch throughout, for a few it was the first meeting after more than a quarter of a century !!!!!! Whew, any wonder then we got going as soon as we saw each other……….all at once, not a moment of silence, totally oblivious of where we were, and how we sounded. It was as if the years just fell away and we were once in the realms of the MCC…….Each trying to catch up with the rest of the crowd, the chatter of 25 years in one go J It really sounded like someone had thrown  a stone at a crow’s nest (Kaakakootil Kallenrinzha pole)…………

And then the surprise came in the form of a cake ordered all the way from Calicut by our dear friend Freddie through one of his cousins who so sweetly delivered it in person to us. We opened the cake and went ‘oh !!!!!’, after all it said ‘MCC Rocks’, it truly does. The surprise turned out to be a double surprise for  me as I myself had called up the restaurant in the morning and ordered a cake with exactly the same inscription, only a smaller one since I was considering the amount of food that would be taken in anyway J Unbelievable really !!!!!  

This kind of camaraderie and sense of belonging is rare to find and we are all lucky to have that. The ability to just start chatting as if you are back in your college class for another regular day of class. Umm, ask people what they ate and I am sure they won’t remember J Ask them what they studied in college and I am sure they remember that either !!!!!! All that you do remember is the wonderful time that you had with your friends, the camaraderie, the leg pulling, the ragging, the exam tensions, the college elections, the fine arts day, the peoples performances, the lecturers and their mannerisms that caught our attention, many known only by their nicknames and so on goes the episodes through your mind.

The waiter, a puny little fellow kept hovering around, trying to get our attention , to ask if the food was ok, we were comfortable, anything we needed, was the spice ok……..all of us just barely acknowledged him and he realized that we were one group who did not really care what we were eating at the moment. So he left us alone for some time. But then he came back and produced the ‘bramhasthra ‘ that really caught our attention. He stood at the head of the table and started off in Malayalam ‘ I know you guys are really busy chatting, but still, please don’t hesitate to tell us if you need anything’. That really was igneous and it got him the attention and we told him not to worry and we carried on…….

The chatter went ‘Oh, you look the same, no change at all’ and then sanity prevails and ‘Oh, maybe a few greys here and there’, ‘Oh, may be a little flab here and there ‘ J. The truth is when old friends meet, the years fall away you see them as they were when you knew them, so you miss the greys, the wrinkles and the flab……

Out comes the love stories of those present and absent as well. Memories, each trying to get a word in, ‘Hey do you remember this’ ‘Hey remember that time when we did this ‘ and on and on it went………..Of course everyone remembered everything and on one forgets two golden years that they spent from 87 to 89 in the corridors of MCC (yeah most of it was spent in the corridors and grounds and lab steps ) and the rest in classes……

We converged at one and before we knew it, it was four thirty and of course we did not want to part, but a few had commitments to keep and so we parted reluctantly with a smile on our lips, a spring in our steps, hopes in our hearts, memories to add on, and definitely feeling a few decades younger J As they say for the whole of that time, we were once again in our own world and no one and nothing can take that away from us .......... Of course now we know thanks to technology, we have the promise of meeting again with more people joining in. All you need is a will to make it happen.  MCC Rocks ……It indeed does !!!!!!