Enough with the memories Google!

So, google has this pesky feature where they show you your “memories”. This day, that year format. For instance, it’s 21^st today, it’ll show me whatever photos are on my phone around today going back even 4-5 years. This could be both a good and bad thing, totally depending on the current situation. You can go aww and send those pictures to your friends and reminisce or look at them get angry and blow your presentation. These could be two extremes.

And google does this almost every day. Every single day. It’ll show me old photos of college, with friends sitting in the library or hanging out in the hostel, of my internship days, when I lived alone in Bangalore and kept hopping around, or my first job and apartment with my friends. They show a transition from a totally care-free “too many friends to handle” with the love of my life college student scenario to a fatter, older “when did I last speak to my friends” giving up on love kinda situation. That escalated or should I say deescalated quickly! You get my point.

But when I look at 2016 and cut to three years later in 2019, so much is different. Nothing is as it was. Everything about my life and my friends has changed completely, starting with the fact that most of us have lost touch or just grown up and apart. We still remember birthdays and big occasions, but that closeness is not there anymore. That kind of closeness comes from 6 people sleeping in a single room because that’s the only one facing the lawn or drinking together after a pathetic lab session on the roof of a local bar sitting on bottle racks eating paneer tikka I guess. But that’s that.

Nobody is dating the person they were with in college. In college we are all naïve enough to think that this is it and we have found the one. Umm, someone should really go and tell them kids till you cross the gate! Once you cross that gate, it’s all going to be different. It’s going to be very hard to hold on. You will not have time to sit outside the library debating Delhi and Mumbai, or bump into people in the corridor at 3 in the night and end up watching a movie you will both love forever or sitting the front row of the auditorium, hooting and shouting “Will you marry me” for that friend who is performing on stage. That only happens in college!

I remember when I was in my first year, my brother told me to cherish these times as much as I could because it wasn’t going to last. Real life would interfere, our jobs, distance and goals will come in between, and it will not be as simple as “Monji in 5”