Romancing my Hamlet

I am back at my native place. In the last two years I could visit my house only twice. So you can imagine how much I look forward to this one month I am here before I join a company in Bangalore.

After having a refreshing bath (I still feel the wintriness of our well-water in the summer heat), I roved outside my house for a while wearing a pair of half-pants and tees and no sooner did I receive gawks from our neighbors and passerby. For them, humans wearing these kinds of dresses would be a drunkard who had lost his outfits during his endeavors or a psychopath who unknowingly threw it off or else, aliens. I don’t know whether they assumed me to be the first two. Man, my marriage prospects!!! :-( Anyways, never ever in my life I caught this much an attention from people, especially girls! Needless to say, I became world famous in my village in no time!

On my visits to my village during my studies (I know there were only two such) I was often confronted with a question. Though there were several versions of the same, the core is the following.

Any person: “Jithu, heard that you are studying at Ahmedabad for some course.”
Me: “Yes, I am studying for MBA at Ahmedabad.”
Any person: “MBA? Ahmedabad? Kerala University has courses on MBA. You didn’t get an admission for that? You should’ve studied well for getting an admission somewhere here itself.”
Me: “Well, this one is better. It is India’s number one business school.”
Any person: “I guess you have been fooled by someone. And do they give you any job after studying there?”
Me: “Hmm... Yeah I think so.”

While I move ahead finishing that conversation I used to hear murmurs like this where the aforementioned “Any person” tells to someone near him.

Any person: “Poor guy. He is suffering a lot in a foreign land.”

There was this branch manager of Canara Bank who rejected the application for educational loan to a friend of mine saying that he hasn’t heard about an institute called The Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and hence it is very unlikely that he will repay the loan.

Coming back to my village, in the evening I took my bike and went for a ride through the village. As far as I’ve explored, nothing has changed here except for a few extra shops in the junction.

Apparently the election heat is more than the summer heat here. Politicians blabber about their achievements and other parties’ mistakes and give promises to make Kerala a heaven. This is the instance where the sentence, ‘crowd has the weakest memory’, comes out with all its relevance. No one remembers, or conveniently forgets, that last time also the promises were the same. After all who said that promises are meant to be put into action?