Once a Sydenhamite, Always a Sydenhamite!

Disclaimer: This post is about my College and my love for it - Sydenham. You must have already read some part of it on my blog if you read me regularly. For the others, it may be boring and dragging. You can simply skip to read it. It does not have a single sarcastic statement about you!

I hate it when I don't have time to do nothing. It is very important for me to waste at least half an hour to an hour a day doing nothing, but it's not happening these days. Before I realize, I already have a backlog for many things. There are so many posts I have not read, so many people I have not spoken with, so many documents pending for review, so many queries unanswered, so much so that I feel I need more than 24 hours a day. Next month is going to be the same for me with teaching deadlines to meet as the exams are approaching, then I will be busy with my Masters exams. PHEW!!

But what disturbs me the most is that I do not find time to blog. And it's not only about writing, but reading too. It disturbs me when I don't even find half an hour each day to do something I have a passion for. Ah, I hope some restless people don't attack me again for this post :P

Coming back to the title of this post - my regular readers know (and already bored and irritated by now) about my love for Sydenham college and Tea centre. Since my lectures are at South Mumbai, I do get a bit of time to take a walk on my favourite roads there. Now, I happened to take a walk on B road where Sydenham is located. Ah, the memories, the time, the people - nostalgia all over again! Nostalgia is a kind of feeling that makes you happy and sad at the same time, and you want to share your experience with people who are associated with that place or memory you are feeling nostalgic about.

I did the same thing. I uploaded a status on facebook. And to my greatest surprise, at least 15-18 sydenhamites commented and liked the status. We all could relate to what I mentioned there. We all got nostalgic and remember our time spent there.

For most Sydenhamites, Sydenham was our first home. We reached there at 8 in the morning and left not before 8 or 9. We spent most of our times either in our society rooms, or common rooms or canteen. Likes like me even spent hours sitting on car bumpers. Morning started with a yell of "JK, chai lao" in the first year. Then the names kept changing from Lancy to Nagesh, to Manju to chotu. I loved to interact with the canteen people. They always had interesting stories to share. I so wish I was blogging at that time. I could have preserved all those memories then.

For commerce students, college is five years of pure fun. For us, it's not a big deal to score minimum passing marks, percentile matters only in the last year and one week study is more than enough to score a first class. This was the reason we indulged more into other activities like organizing festivals and various events, taking part in script/skit writing, discussing guys (lol) and any other activity which could help us stay in college from morning to evening.

I have very fond memories of Sydenham. I remember watching so many cricket matches in Canteen, staring at S who used to be a football player and crush of most of us :P, having 7-8 cups of chai (that's quite normal, during exams, I never even counted the number of cups!), solving crosswords, preparing posters and doing so many other useful and useless things.

Sydenham canteen is very famous for the Chinese food we get there; typical Indian Chinese (which tastes a lot better than an authentic one!). Every single day I survived on Schezwan rice or veg/chicken chilly dry with bread slices. Even students and professors from other colleges came to Sydenham canteen to eat. For years and years down the line and even today, the taste still remains the same.

Today, I teach students. When I come across a Sydenhamite, I cannot stop myself from asking that student questions about the college, canteen, people, events, festivals, alumnis, magazines and ten other things. This is not the case only with me. Pick any Sydenhamite from my list, and you will see them going crazy about it the same way! We are too connected with it. Maybe everyone is with one's college; but Sydenhamites are a bit crazier than others. You can get anything done from them in the name of Sydenham and they will do that with a broad smile on their face. And it will not be considered foolish :)

We all use this tag-line for ourselves - Once a Sydenhamite, always a Sydenhamite!

PS: I can in fact write 10 posts on my love for Sydenham and not get tired. But I will spare you guys. :)