Rocking in the Free World

As term 3 at B-school draws to a close, I find myself increasingly reticent insofar as wanting to talk about life here is concerned. Not like it is a bad thing, but it certainly fills you up to saturation and when you do get a chance to, you’d rather talk about life outside of the campus. Outside the physical confines and boundaries, as well as outside of its circle of influence which has spread far and wide, sometimes in a comforting way, and some other times in ways that can at best be classified as unnerving.

I had mentioned in a post before about how this is one of the best things to have happened to me career-wise, but that I wouldn’t let this be the focal point of my existence, quite unlike how it has been for most of my illustrious contemporaries who pepper their facebook pages and blogs with things so B-school centric that you’d end up wondering whether they had a life outside of college before they came here.

Having said that, I know they did first hand, but this place does overwhelm you and take over all your time and energy and leave you with nothing else to think about or nothing else to focus on, which sometimes is a bad thing.

I just re-read what I wrote so far and realized that I’m oozing tact and diplomacy in a manner that would make tactless Hari of the past proud. But at what price?

Sometimes, when I get a chance to sit and reflect in those precious moments of alone-time that I had such copious access to previously, I end up coming up with theories that state the obvious. But I’d like to think that I package it well enough to make it sound like something decent that I conjured up and pat myself on the back for it. There’s very little to be proud of, so might as well go the whole nine yards in blowing my own trumpet.

This particular theory I came up with is what I’d like to call the ‘Infinitely Prolonged Social Interaction Theory‘. When the first version was drafted, I had incorrectly referred to it as the ‘Coda Theory of Social Interaction’, thinking of how Coda referred to an unfinished masterpiece of sorts, but a quick wiki check showed me that I was way off the mark.

The Infinitely Prolonged Social Interaction Theory states that a conversation with an interesting person who you have a matching wavelength with can potentially go on for an infinite period of time, if not for life getting in the way.

Think about it. With someone you get along with like a house on fire, you’d end up having conversations that digress on a consistent basis, sometimes without even coming back to the original topic at hand. A freewheeling, unmoderated conversation flows naturally such that you think of things to say without having to put any effort to do so, and the sheer thrill it provides is one of the things that makes interactions with other humans worthwhile.

No agenda, no actual reason to talk, save for sharing ideas, sharing thoughts and invariably, sharing laughter.

There are very few people out there that I would say I could have infinitely prolonged social interactions with, but there’s another reason to count one’s blessings.

Like Jack Kerouac’s famous words in ‘On The Road’:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

I don’t know if those are the exact kind of people that are for me, but in a book that I will end up writing, I will make sure to elucidate and pay tribute in no uncertain terms to the type of people that would evoke similar reactions in me.