Given a chance, at any point of time in life , any one will be happy and thrilled to visit his home town or village, visit child hood friends and also see the primary school or high school he may attended while he was young and simply breathe the earthly soil of the village. In my case, the long cherished dream was to visit the region called Mahe, the western enclave of Pondicherry Union Territory laying on the lap of the west coast, very near Tellicherry. This was the place where I started my academic career as Assistant Professor in a pre- Degree College , which was then stationed in a school building, overlooking the Mahe river from behind and the lovely backwaters/ Mahe river was mingling with the waves of Arabian Sea. It was really a picturesque postcard kind of typical natural Kerala scenery. I joined Mahe college forty years ago ago, on August 6th 1970, soon after getting my M.A degree from Madras Presidency College.
After serving for two years (1970-72) at Mahe and getting married during the summer vacation, I returned back to Mahe alone in 1972 to pack up my belongings and start for home, not Pondicherry town but only to Karaikal Government Arts College. There I started my second innings, as a college teacher, this time as a married man. At that time I never thought that for the next thirty eight years I was going to be distanced from my first work place - a place which gave me a decent life and security as a college teacher.
My marital life at Karaikal as also the academic ambiance in the college was incredibly wonderful, and that kind of bliss, exuberance and energetic family and academic life, I could never dream later; four years of stay at Gokhule Institute, Pune during late 70’s and early 80’s – one fourth of the period in Pune spent with family consisting of young wife and young kids .This was the most fruitful time academically speaking but I returned back home in 1982 after the extension of fellowhip without the Ph.D degree , as the area chosen for research viz international finance was not only slippery but I was also too naïve and more academically more greedy. This attitude towards perfection and craving for more academic scholarship continues to remain as a stumbling block for my growth. No regrets.
In the last four decades, especially in the last few years I have travelled extensively to many places but Mahe was always missing in the equation of my journey. My heart beat alone knows how much I longed to see that sleepy village then which is of course more active now.
Thanks to more private capital inflows and Govt funds mushroom growth of Shopping complexes had appeared all over the small region which appears different now. For reasons hard to explain or elaborate, I could not take even a single step towards visiting that region ever since I returned from there in 1972. At long last, came an opportunity to visit the place as a member of Governing Body of Mahe Dental College Hospital, in the capacity of the representative of V.C’s nominee.
Like Cheran’s Autograph movie, I had my own excitement and sense of exhilaration to visit the place but unlike the movie for me there was no agenda to see the old boys and girls, as they might be positioned in different places. This does not imply that there was no boy or a girl in my mind . They all belong to past history and many of them I will never see in this birth again. But the feeling of love or infatuation that I had with at least one or two girls was unilateral and also immature.But it was definitely a kind of love at the right age- a finer feeling which age cannot wither away nor customs stale to tell in Shakespear’s language regardless of the fact that I have become grand father.
The desire was always there to see and engage them in an intellectual conversation.My subconscious mind was craving for it- Knowing fully well that it was next to impossible to find them. They might be in the mid fifties now Thanks to the travel agency and student friends ‘ help in my office, the to and fro trip by air was quickly fixed . I found myself in a fantastic mood of imagination,-seeing and smelling the soil, sitting in my office, a sense of the quiet descended at my heart, by thinking about the visit; Then I recollected my first trip to Mahe as a lone traveler in Mangalore mail forty years ago, landing there on a rainy day to join duty at Mahatma Gandhi Government Arts College. The infinite beauty of an enchanting Kerala girl in the compartment-that vivid memory, lingered in my mind; even after forty years the memory fails to evaporate, though the face has been forgotten. Small wonder then, Poet Bharathi also spoke about the company of beautiful young Kerala girls while rowing boat in the moon lit Ganges river, and singing lyrics in sweet Telugu.
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