A Walk to Remember

Come July and the campus will be beaming and buzzing with enthusiasm, vigour, passion, and a lot of attitude. Stop! Stop! Now before any of you start thinking that there is a war that will be going on think again! Because will not be war but a young and refreshing batch of students who will be coming in. Now, what is going to follow is not an extract from the book, A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks but a short guide for all you students coming into a fresh phase of your life called graduation and for those of you higher up, post graduation being the golden word.
Also this is not going to be a guide, where you are going to have a pointer or what to do or what not to do chart. What I am
going to put up in front of you is a very interesting way of getting used to this larger than life place called Garden City College, in our very own Garden City of India – Bangalore.

Firstly, let’s start with a brief description of the kind of people who are going to be here with you and by this, I do not mean
the management. I mean your very own peer group, classmates, seniors, super seniors and the list goes on. For those of you who are worried about ragging as such need not worry as this word does not even exist in the dictionary of this abode of learning. Cut, back again to where I was. Here you will find an absolute blend of cultures, where you may be in for a cultural shock. For some, it may be a usual way of life, for some, it may be absurd and others, it may be a fantasy.
55 countries, one roof, let alone the countries, people from different states from all over India. A huge amount of adaptation is required already. Now the word to be remembered is right here, “Adapt”. Yes, you word that I am going to emphasise over here and it would be the only thing required for you to have an amazing time here.
If I were to go on about the avenues and the opportunities this place has to offer, the entire pages of the magazine would be filled. So let’s cut down the crap as this younger generation that calls itself “Youngistaan” would put it. Let’s get to the point. So here you are in this place and wondering what to do and what not to do, petrified of what the seniors would do to you, conscious about your every move as you are new to this place, apprehensive to open up too soon as you would not want to be completely over exposed later on, moving around notknowing how to make friends or rather more important whom to trust?

So this for those of you who would like to settle down in this place as soon as possible, this is a simple thing to do, and this is the experience of my dear friend Kabir. I guess his story would sum up for all you guys reading this as to how to move on and get used to this place. Kabir was this young enthusiastic youngster who came from the city of Lucknow, not knowing the mannerisms of how Bangalore functions and also not having been away from home ever. This was his first
experience and I happened to meet him on my first day of the orientation program in this very college.
He was very apprehensive and had all the traits I mentioned above that most of you would have, also coming from Lucknow, which is quite a conservative city, he had never interacted with members of the opposite sex, so coming into this place was a completely new experience to him, he probably assumed he was to be on a completely new planet. But there was this one thing about him, he never gave up come what may and this is the attitude which you all should have as this is what has taken him to the place he is at right now. So now this story goes into flashback scenario as you would see in most movies.

The date 23rd July was his first day in college and mine too. We happened to sit right next to each other and that is how this story begins. We had an introduction session by the then principal of the college, boring session putting us to sleep at 9 am in the morning, we somehow managed to survive that and the next session was about to begin in which the fresher’s – yes I guess this is the term you are all familiar with, were supposed to perform or rather just doanything that they liked so that it would be an ice breaker for them, also a platform for them to interact and get to know each other.