(A)shma

Have I told you about Ashu? My super cool friend who goes by the dictum hum isse zyaada cool hote to freeze ho jaate?

I must have mentioned her quite a few times and I keep popping in her posts once in a while too *lucky me*. She was the one who started me on blogging. She is this brilliant mathematical and logical brain with a near photographic memory. One fine day surprise surprise she started blogging. I had already missed the boat though I always thought of myself as a 'writer'. When I saw Ashu's posts, I was impressed by her clarity and her vocabulary. That really inspired me to claim some space in the nebulous digital world and start writing. Yet again she has motivated me to get on with the A-Z challenge, where every day we post a letter from the alphabet. I am late for this too, I had seen people do this. This was supposed to be in the month of April(I guess). I am late by a good month. Ashu did ask me to get on with it, but I was too flaccid. Seeing her posts and the lack of mine, I thought – why not? So lets get ready for 25 days of rambling and ranting and bla di bla from yours truly :)

As I mentioned earlier, having the more scientific bent of mind, I did not associate anything literary with her. Which goes on to prove how prejudiced am I. Or maybe just how multi faceted is she! I had the first look of her during counselling for engineering seats (the process where successful candidates are granted admission into various colleges spread across the state). She was just ahead of me in the rankings and as we were going through the acceptance procedure I congratulated her. (I doubt if she has any memory of it at all, because she is a bit of a goldfish when it comes to attention span :P. I know this on one hand and a beautiful mind on the other – that’s Ashma!) Fate was to bring us even closer, since we were dorm mates. Coincidentally, our beds were adjacent. For the initial few days, she was practically at her local guardian's house. I got very few chances to meet her, till the laboratory sessions began. After which we got along famously.

Back in our days, we had a practice called 'ragging' or what the seniors claimed to be ways to increase interactions with new comers. One trick question we were often asked was our hobby. You say anything, you were digging a hole for yourself and sometimes for some others too. For the lack of anything better I had stuck with reading. When asked my favourite novel (people were very well read ) I had claimed Gone With The Wind. Which undoubtedly is a very nice novel and is definitely in top spot for me. Another fact that worked was, it was the only novel by Margaret Mitchell( actually written by her). So that helped me a bit. So I was not harassed on questions regarding her other works. The genre being quite typical was also not much of an issue to handle. Thornbirds being the only other which stake a similar claim. That was another book I loved at the end of my first year. I digress, its not about me :D

Ashma being the truthful soul as a typical Aries had said, watching tv was her hobby. Thankfully she spent a lot of time at her local guardians, but the days she was in town, she had to write quite a lot of stories of quite a lot of soaps :) Looking back it all feels hilarious though those days were very stressful with classes, inductions, assignments and what not. She had never read a book till she entered engineering. By the end of it, I am sure she could state reading as one of her major hobbies. She is now a voracious reader. Having good speed reading skills (me jealous) she could devour books in a single sitting. She also had this habit of not putting a book down if she was say a 50 or 100 or 150 or even 200 pages  away from the end. There were many times when she was reading well into the night, and would have a couple of hours of studying and would still ace the exam. Talk about being gifted :)

Post graduation, we moved on to our separate career paths. Ashu and I were… hmmm… wait a minute. I might as well take a cue from the soaps Ashu used to watch and leave the rest for another day. For I got 25 more days to blitz through.

Rest in the next episode ;)