A Pupa and Its Journey

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The only campus Jay knew was the Government Polytechnic College, where he pondered for three years about his future as a writer, after his higher secondary science group disaster.

His parents wanted him to be a physician. Therefore, he was forced to join the science group. Later, when he passed in almost all the science subjects in narrow margins  they wanted him to choose a path for a job. So he was thrown into the courtyards of technical education. As he joined the diploma for electronics engineering, his hopes were sky high but his dreams were shattered.

Though he always liked the art, the art of poetry, the art of story telling, the art of writing; it dried in the rotten dry atmosphere of that technical institution.

Every thing there was hopelessly theoretic and disturbingly practical, thought he.

There happened an incident. He encountered a girl. He would say- “the most beautiful girl I ever met”. The basic instinct gave a jump and the writer inside his soul evoked.

He wanted to talk to her. But something in the atmosphere gave him a pinch and brought him back to reality, which seemed unbearably annoying. As a matter of fact, he never saw there, a boy or a girl speaking secretly behind the walls or under the trees as in a common campus atmosphere. Some of the people, who are impractically practical, loved each other; found time and space for each other; out side the campus. He knew the reason, as every other student there do-‘the morality keepers’, the students' union. Those have to face an even corporal punishment, who ever engages in the open-air romance. The reason they said for it seemed ridiculous to Jay. They said in a polytechnic college students who had just finished the tenth standard also come for studies, along with those after the higher secondary course, like Jay. So the impact of romance on those ‘kids’ would be different from that on the elders.

What a pity! Why had the institution named as a ‘college’? That was a new change from the authorities. He always longed to ask this question on the faces of those student’s union leaders and the principal and the head of the department. But he was afraid of them. He even feared to speak out the name of the organization that ruled the union there. All of them seemed despots. The union leaders, the principal, the head of the department- all of them seemed despots.

His mind, inexplicably longed for freedom, until he failed in all the three years, and joined B.A.English Language and Literature, in distance education, in the Kannur University.
His annoyance in the polytechnic college for three years has been evaded by writing. He wrote poems. Poems on love; on the beauty of the girl whom he met there; and on loneliness  Thus his deserted dreams started blooming. Those poems have never been able to win her heart but gave him the courage and confidence to go for his dreams—from the technical campus to the world of Literature.

In the years after the polytechnic course, he witnessed another type of educational institution, the 'Arts and Science Colleges'. They wanted rather money than talented students. He visited them when he searched for an admission in the B.A.English course.

He saw those campuses from the distance of a stranger, where he saw girls and boys full of camaraderie, romancing and dreaming. He would call them ‘fortunate’, as his thoughts ran back to the premises of his first ‘college’ campus, in the polytechnic college.

He had no recommendations for the regular college admission and no money either to fill the mouths of the greedy officials.

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“You know how difficult it is, now-a-days, for a person who had secured a just first class in his plus two exams, to get an admission in a regular college in merit seat.”- He would say, if you asked him-“ That’s why I decided to join B.A in distance education”.

There he found no campus rules to confine him, and no person who would prompt him to follow some hopeless theories but only freedom. He was free enough to consummate with his love.

He would say if you squinted at him-“This universe is my university, nature is my teacher, and literature is my love.”
He was a pupa earlier, waiting for the wings to grow. Now he is a fly. Though knows, the wings will take him to his pyre, he will fly...He will gradually grow thousands and thousands of wings, like the pages of a book, with designs and colours similar to the words printed in the poems and novels he read.That is his journey and his destiny.