And the credit goes to…

There are a lot of things about childhood we still cherish…for me it was been an unpacked bundle of memories that can't be ever missed with the passing time. I was pushed back to those nostalgic moments by a “friend request” in Orkut from a very old friend, Ajay John Gray. After adding him to my profile, I quickly wrote a testimonial for him that goes like this...

He is someone with whom I've grown up & can never ever miss those nostalgic days. And something we shared in common - poetry. Still remember the days we spend writing in class. On poetry competitions we use to finish fast to exchange it and make corrections before submission. But I always wonder what separated us. Life caught us in different zones with different thoughts & different dreams. May be this difference can be read from our poetry too, he is the man of grammatically - thematically perfect poems. But I used to write for a music set in mind. The diff - He was always been a good POET where as I'm was more a lyricist. Ajay- I hope I could analyze our life well with our poetry itself. In reality both of us know that we are no writers anymore as we dreamt...but the victims of time...But u know, u can still break the time and go ahead chasing your dreams. U can read it as the lines of someone who read your poetry as well as your mind better than anyone else.

I guess this explains all about him & me. It must be at the same bench or while having a fight or at the play ground or while washing the lunch box…I don’t remember the exact time or day which we both were caught close. But that date back to the corners of an odd time of the 3rd standard at Nirmala Junior School, Kerala.

Today I am a media professional and at times a designer, a writer or a filmmaker. But here I want to leave all the credits to those moments of childhood with him and of course to those friends of our 3rd- 4th standards listened to our stories during the breaks and in the school bus. Most of those silly stories were inspired by the kid’s story books - Balarama and Poompaatta. The funniest fact was they took life in the class hours- written (Scripted and Screen played), scratched (edited), drawn in the notebook (Story-boarded) and finally described with a bit of acting (released with AD/ PR strategies) to the friends during the breaks. After so many years now we are able to correlate to those moments to our very real life for survival in 2008. But then it was Creative and now its just Cre’ACT’ive.

A lot many seconds, minutes, hours, days and years passed. Nirmala Junior School changed to Nirmala High School. ‘Mayavi’ of Balarama changed to the detective Sherlock Holms of Arthur Conan Doyle. The look and feel of our stories too changed. A new diary still remained the worst of all temptations. I used to have my own version of Tarzan named “Dalwar” and his pet animal companion “Meeta”, a wild hyena. “Dalwar” had a sign language with fingers, which was designed and executed by Ajay & me. The code language was used more effectively when we act the “The Dalwar” scenes during the class intervals. The nearby church ground and the school play ground had seen enough of this Drama. In fact all these went on till our 8th-9th standards. Like Lee Hawk's Phantom he too had his own Logos and Slogans. And he was the hidden hero of his loved tribe – Polo Tribe. Hope this sounds really crazy…….Coz that time those novels ruled our minds.

The fool play and the interest for human heros got faded away as the time passed and poems took an upper hand. Thanks to the class and school level competitions- Arun and Ajay became a familiar friend figure. In fact those days we identified a bit a competition between us. Yet we used to do exchange and proof read each other’s creation.

Both of us won many prizes. For me two of those certificates are still close to heart. The first one for the thrill of getting a prize for the first time. The story was about the “death of grand father” in the point of view of his ignorant-innocent grandson. May be I could relate well to the story as I participated in the competition after attending the funeral of a grandfather like person in my locality. The prize was given by Malayalam film actor– Nedumudi Venu.

The second one was even more exciting. One day my dad got me a Malayalam novel, “Oru Sangeethanam Poole” by Malayalam writer Perumbadavam Sreedharan. The novel was about my all time favorite writer “Fyodor Dostoevsky”. It was an execllent portrayal of the painful, yet romantic days in Dostoevsky’s life when he was forced to write a novel (“The Gambler”) in return to the money borrowed from a real cunning guy. The time allowed was quite challenging and he had to get the help of a lady stenographer “Anna.” As “The Gambler” progressed though Dostoevsky’s mind and Anna’s type writer, “Oru Sangeethnam Poole” took a new turn, by which the writer and stenographer fell for each other for the same relation the pen have for the paper. Sreedharan defined Dostoevsky as "The writer who have God's signature on his heart." I was so excited when I heard that I’m getting a prize for my poem on “Malayalam”, from Mr.Sreedharan. It so happened just two days after me finished reading “Oru Sangeerthanam Poole” and was totally mesmerized by the romance he penned.

Now back to Ajay and me, at one point of time he became more popular than me in his poems, even reaching the state level poem completion. It was quite likely for me to be jealous of him. “What made my writings go down?” I used to wonder. But today I know, where we both stood then and that is nothing but my testimonial for him. I wish I would have realized this then……………

It’s been 8 years since I met Ajay. We are not writers or poets anymore as we used to dream. After my tenth I 've not written a word especially in Malayalam other than usual class notes and documents in comp. The habbit of blogging itself is something I gained very recently.

He is an Ayurvedic Doctor back in hometown Kerala and I’m a Knowledge Management Media professional here in Chennai. In simple words, we had become two individuals known to eachother at some point of time living in two different world with different dreams and different visions……….