Brainsmiths- Mind formation not mindless information!

Today was one of my closest friend’s birthday, Sanjana. The interesting part is that I talked to her exactly after a year. The last conversation we had was on her previous birthday. And we gradually lost touch while she helplessly made efforts to get my contact number. But it never felt as if we hadn’t talked all this long. There were no barriers due to distance and we talked for more than an hour!

It felt so good to talk to her after all this time and suddenly all the memories of her flushed back into my memory. We became friends when I joined Brainsmiths Coaching classes in 10^th and we were tuition-mates. Earlier we weren’t very close to each other, but unexpectedly became so close that I would spend most of my time at her house. She loved watching movies and even though I am not much of a movie-freak we had seen every single movie released at that time, even lame movies like Rakht or Socha na tha or that Diya Mirza+Emraan Hashmi movie with the song “mujhe tumse mohabbat hai. Not only her, everybody in Brainsmiths was good-natured and fun-loving. I had the best time of my life there. The best part was nobody was fake or artifitial in anyway and we had such innocent definitions of having fun. We used to eat junk food (noodles or samosas) all the time at simple cheap places and loved having ice-creams all the time. We would puncture each other’s cycles, play truth-and-dare all the time, tease each other and sometimes study together. We would go to temples and churches but would make a lot of noise that we would leave the place feeling embarrassed. We would sit for hours after the tuitions got over, simply chatting about every single topic we could think of. Even the teachers wouldn’t mind our mischiefs but still would lecture us all the time to get serious about life.Those day were so simple, sweet, lovely, unsophisticated with absolutely no worries. We failed in many attempts to go for morning walks, only to gather at Sanjana’s house and eat lovely breakfast and then decide to go for a movie. Even working in Sanjana’s kitchen was fun whenever her mom asked us to. It was there, I had learnt to make coffee while we used to study together. We would stir coffee powder and sugar for a long time before pouring milk on it.

“Brain-fiesta” our cultural programme that year was the best party I have ever been to. We had presented an excellent dance-number, had lovely dinner and danced till 10 (which for us was a big deal in 10^th) at the DJ party. It was at that DJ party that I had learnt crazy dance steps which I can never ever forget. I was also given the “most sincere student” award which seemed very funny to everybody because I was the naughtiest girl there. Sanjana had got the “best performance” award for which everybody said that maybe our titles had got exchanged because she was definitely very sincere in studies. It was Brainsmiths where I got my name “gaay” (cow) and I never even felt awkward whenever they called me that.

Me and Pranjali had named our group as “nutties” which initially included only girls. And the boys then made a group called “Aasma” taking initials of their names. Later these two groups merged into one lovely group which even after many years if meets will never be formal, never artifitial to one another and am sure will chatter for hours together.

Most of the time it was me, Sanjana, Pranjali, Amrit, Mayank and Siddharth who would hang out together but we were occasionally joined by Aishwarya(vatsa and Mishra), Aditya, Megha, Ruhi, Arpit, Rohit, Divya, Nikita, Apoorva and many others. I love all of them and simply treasure (like everybody else in our group) every single moment of brainsmiths. We had even made diaries for everybody where we had written funny things about everybody which would remind us of them later and make us smile. I still have a sudden gush of happiness whenever I look at the diaries. So many wonderful memories are stored in there.