My wing in C-block is empty. All my friends are leaving one by one. Two years of blood and toil are over. With a decent job in hand, I should be happy to be able to be finally away from this grind of B-school. But suddenly, I feel an emptiness that I never thought existed. All through those sleepless nights spent with droopy eyes stuck on excel sheets on the comps, we had developed a camaraderie that crept upon us, unnoticed, uninvited. And suddenly I miss the people, I miss the grind, I miss the jubilations and the frustrations that have dogged my every step through these two years at XIMB. The hostel seems deserted. It is like that great birthday cake, which you had hogged and now the broken crumbs stare at you from an empty plate. I envy those few lucky souls who have left the campus the very day the final exams ended. They were spared the pain of seeing a home disintegrate. They left when everything was still the same, when the parting was yet to begin.

A junior is playing a Bengali song on C top-floor. And no, he is not a Bong. He is a Tamilian Brahmin from Madras. This has happened time and again. XIMB has acted like a gigantic melting pot where the individual cultures of the students have mingled into a unique one. We have these dance parties, fondly known as 'JLT's, mainly because one can never predict when we will be in a mood. We decide and bingo, we have the JLT tonight! There the devoted Oriya swings to the beat of Punjabi folk songs and the quintessential Bong sheds his lethargy to shake a leg to a hit Telegu number. We spoke the same tongue, chilled out in similar ways, had fun in the network through win-pop (a network messenger service) and marched to the same tune.

Now the party is over. Time to get on to the jobs. Time to come out of the classroom. Time to live and time to die.

XIMB shall stay within me, ensconced in its pearly cocoon, to be entered into when life becomes a shade less kind and I miss my friends and the life we had lived.

* Contributed by -
Rhiju Bhowmick,
Ex-Media Cell,
PGP Batch: 2002-2004,
XIM Bhubaneswar.