AT 35, I am doing well by every adult metric I once admired. I live in the NCR, work in a glass-and-steel MNC building, swipe access cards with practised confidence and sign emails that carry designations longer than my childhood address. Life, on paper, looks impressive. Yet some mornings — between the first sip of coffee and the metro’s metallic sigh — I feel an unreasonable gratitude to the boy I once was in Yamunanagar.
Back then, notebooks were not stationery; they were companions. We wrapped them in brown paper jackets, slipped on transparent covers like ceremonial armour and wrote our names with exaggerated pride, as if destiny might forget us otherwise. Those copies smelt of ink, erasers and ambition. Margins bloomed with doodles, crush initials hid inside uneven hearts and a careless blot could pass for abstract art.
A “Very Good” in red ink weighed more than any annual appraisal I’ve received since. Funny how a tick mark from a teacher could power an entire week, while today a performance review needs dashboards, deliverables and caffeine. Progress, clearly, has upgraded its packaging, not its warmth.
My day begins with logins, not longhand. I attend meetings that could have been emails, type crisp thoughts into colder fonts, and mute notifications like unwanted emotions. Autocorrect trains me like a child. Efficiency has won, undeniably. Still, somewhere between copy-paste, calendar pings and corporate smiles, the music slipped out. As novelist Milan Kundera said, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Mine rebels most fiercely during traffic jams.
In Yamunanagar, evenings arrived with dust, dusk and distant temple bells. We studied under slow fans, sipping steel-tumbler tea, convinced that time was generous. In the NCR, time is billable. Salary grows, weekends shrink and handwriting quietly retires.
We stretched notebooks to the last page, saving an inch for a poem, a secret or a letter never sent. Flowers were pressed between chapters; Wordsworth shared space with Kabir, coexisting without syllabus anxiety. Mistakes were tender. Torn edges meant the page had lived. Even the rustle of paper felt like applause after effort.
Last month, during a visit home, I wandered into a raddi shop. There they were — sold by the kilo — the same notebooks, weighed with indifference. The metal scale clanged like a verdict. The shopkeeper tore out pages to wrap soap, and I felt my childhood being bundled for convenience.
To relive that memory, I now maintain a notebook. Nothing dramatic — just a place for tasks done, tasks pending and deadlines pretending to behave. Between reminders and reviews, I scribble stray lines of poetry, half-formed thoughts, and sentences that refuse to be productive. It feels like a small, stubborn rebellion. Ink slows me down, demands patience, smudges fingers. In those uneven lines, I find the Yamunanagar boy again — still writing, still wondering — proving that not all memories fade; some simply change offices.
