I reckon I first started writing meaningful poetry back in the first year of engineering. I think it had something to do with drab and boring lectures and sitting at the back of the class. To be blunt and honest, the first time that I ever slept in a lecture (literally and metaphorically) was in engineering. I had never been so bored by a monotonous lecture ever before in all my years of education! I cannot imagine where the professors learn to teach like they do, two cups of coffee couldn’t keep me awake sometimes! (Though I suspect staying up all night might just have had a small role to play but I bet that was rather insignificant!) Sitting on the last benches, I remember having snacks and sometimes even an entire 7 course lunch, playing hangman, cross and noughts, join the dots, Sudoku, reading books like the Da Vinci code, learning to write backwards, reading up and understanding things like six-stroke engines, planning out how to go about making a hover-craft, creating a poll-of-the-day (which might I add, was sometimes the highlight of the day, much obliged to JD for all those wild thoughts!) messaging friends, flirting with women over texts (umm…ok so there wasn’t much of that but lemme say it here, it’ll make me a little happier!) and of course, writing poems…scores of poems.
But to be honest, I never thought my poems were any good (heck I would still say so! I think it’s only the fact that some others seem to think otherwise that keeps me going!) I think I wrote a poem a day on an average about anything, everything and nothing! Random thoughts as ever! I do think I lack self-confidence when it comes to what I am writing. To me, all that I write never seems to be good enough and everytime I read something I have written, I always want to revisit it and redo it all over again. It was something that one of my friends had once noticed, she said it was frightening how I could be confident about anything, sometimes even things that I was terrible at and manage to pull it off like the greatest heist of the century and yet when it came to the one thing that I excelled at (I am not praising myself here…it wasn’t me that said it in the first place! Although I am a bit of a ham sometimes!) I was surprisingly doubtful of my own abilities! I still think her opinions were a little too flattering but heck, why should I complain about getting praised right? I think I’ll let her views stand!
Well anyways, the poems I wrote through most of the first semester always found their way to the dust-bin as soon as they materialized on paper. I always thought they were terrible. Well, I was studying in the library with (someone who was more of an acquaintance than a friend back then) when I had one of my moments and I phased out into my own little world to start penning down my thoughts in a rhyme. It was about friendship and something on those lines. As usual, I wrote it down and then threw it away. She saw the poem whilst I was writing it and when I had thrown it away in the dust-bin, she picked up the torn pieces from that pile. She went through the trouble of actually figuring out the jig-saw puzzle, gluing all the pieces onto another paper and gifting them to me the next day! She convinced me to write and we struck a deal wherein she lay claim to all my poems and I was never to destroy any of my works, bound by a contract! (Yeah I know! Women!) I think that was the first step in a friendship that has stood the test of time (touchwood!) I guess I will always remember that as the day a friend made a poet and a poet made a friend!
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