Rekindled
Twenty five years is a long time.
Long enough to build a career. Long enough to build a family. Long enough to build a life. Long enough to lose touch with people who mattered. Long enough to forget, without quite meaning to, what the years before all of it actually felt like.
I went back to Coimbatore a few weeks ago. One hundred and forty of us, the batch of 2001 from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, returning to the campus we called home for four years before life pulled us in every direction it could.
I did not know what to expect. I knew I was looking forward to it. I did not know how much.
We arrived on a Friday evening. And something started happening almost immediately that I have been thinking about ever since.
Within minutes of arriving, faces appeared that I had not seen in twenty five years. Names came back. Stories surfaced. And without any of us deciding to do it, we picked up exactly where we left off. No preamble. No catching up on credentials. No one asked what you did or where you worked or what you had become.
We just went back to being who we were before we acquired a professional identity that became our primary identity.
For most of the year, the identity I carry is my job title, my organisation, my role, my experience. That is how I am introduced. That is how I introduce myself. That is the first layer of every professional interaction. Outside of that I carry the identity of a father, a spouse, a son, a brother. Whatever is needed for the people I love. These identities are real and they matter. But they are still identities. Roles carried for audiences, however close and however willing.
For two days none of them existed. Nobody carried any of it. Nobody needed any of it.
What came back instead was something buried deep enough that most of us had forgotten it was still there. The individual before the career and the family and the life built itself around them. Raw. Young. Unedited. Immature and not yet formed. No role to carry. No identity chosen for any audience. Just the person, as they actually were, before any of it began.
That is what came back on Friday evening in Coimbatore. And I am still thinking about what that means.
The Night We Went Back
One hundred and forty people who had not been in the same space for twenty five years, suddenly together again. Some remembered faces but had lost the names. Some remembered names but needed a moment to place the face. Some walked straight into a hug without needing either. By the end of the evening none of that mattered. The names came back. The faces settled. The stories started.
And they did not stop.
The university had arranged for us to stay overnight in the hostel. The same hostel. Double sharing, triple sharing, the same way we had lived for four years as students. I do not think any of us slept more than a couple of hours. There was too much to recover. Memories that had been sitting untouched for twenty five years started surfacing, one pulling another with it. We laughed at who we were twenty five years ago. The antics. The immaturity. The things we thought were a big deal that were not. Stories about families now sat alongside stories about hostel life then. The version of ourselves we were then and the version we are now, both present in the same conversation, neither one more real than the other.
What was present that evening was joy. Pure and uncomplicated.
And what was absent is what I keep coming back to.
Not one person asked what anyone had achieved. Not one conversation turned to job titles or organisations or salaries or seniority. Nobody was comparing. Nobody was positioning. The things that structure almost every professional interaction we have for fifty weeks of the year simply did not show up. And with one hundred and forty people together, that was not an accident. It was not politeness either.
There is a specific kind of friendship that can only be formed at university. It forms because of what we are when we arrive there. We are the rawest version of ourselves. We have just left home and family for the first time. The roots we grew up with have been temporarily lifted and we are laying down new ones, in a new place, among strangers, with nothing to offer each other except who we actually are. No reputation preceding us. No identity chosen for an audience. No role to perform. The friendships that form in that condition are built on something that almost no other relationship in adult life is built on. Just the person. Nothing else.
That is what was in the hostel that Friday night. That is what was in every conversation across those two days. Friendships that were formed when none of us had anything to prove and have asked nothing different of us since.
Twenty five years later. No gap. No awkwardness. No catching up required.
Just people who knew each other.
The Felicitation
The following morning was the main event. Four hours in the university auditorium, organised by a committee formed from our own batch. But the part that stayed with me started well before the day itself.
Each department was responsible for felicitating its own staff. The teachers, the professors, the lab staff, the people who were present in our lives during those four years and who most of us had not thought about collectively in a very long time. Pulling together the material for our department’s felicitation meant going back to everyone in the batch and asking them to reach into memory. What do you remember about this person. What did they do. What moment have you carried without knowing you carried it.
Someone remembered the head of department’s precise standard of expectation in every class, the kind that made the whole batch sit a little straighter without being told to. Someone else remembered their class teacher, the one person across four years who knew every student by name and by disposition. There was the teacher who used to offer lifts to students into and out of Ettimadai in a red Maruti, because twenty five years ago Ettimadai was quite a trek from anywhere, and that quiet generosity was remembered by people who had not thought about it in decades. And then there was the detail that quietly delighted everyone when it came up in the preparation. Two of our teachers, both from the same department, both remembered warmly by the whole batch for very different reasons, had found each other and married. None of us had known.
These were not vague warm feelings. They were specific. The memories had been sitting intact for twenty five years without anyone knowing they were still there.
The act of pulling all of that together transported everyone who contributed to it. The whole process of preparing the felicitation became its own reunion before the reunion had formally begun.
I had the honour of delivering the felicitation for our department on the day. Standing there, reading out what our batch remembered about the people who taught us, I was aware of something that is difficult to articulate precisely. These were not just teachers we were thanking. They were present at a specific period of our formation. They were there when we were still becoming whoever we were going to be. And we were standing there, twenty five years later, as the people we became, trying to say thank you for something that had shaped us in ways most of us had never quite put into words before.
It also became, quietly, a competition between departments. Which department did it best. I will leave that to others to judge.
But what I know is that the gratitude in that auditorium was not performed. Not obligatory. It was the kind that surfaces when you go back far enough and look honestly at who helped you get from there to here.
The Students
After the felicitation, we spent a few hours with the current final year students of the university. The university had organised a session where we could talk to them, answer their questions, address their concerns about stepping out into the world, and share whatever we had gathered across twenty five years that might be useful to people standing where we once stood.
What struck me first was how confident they were. How much more informed. They are entering a world that is genuinely more uncertain than the one we entered, and they know it. And yet they carry something I recognised immediately.
They carry the hope of a twenty year old.
Undimmed. Unqualified. Eyes full of it. Questions full of it. The kind that has not yet been tested by the years and so has no reason to be anything other than complete.
I did not reflect on what that meant in the room itself. That came later, in conversations with friends over the days that followed, as we all slowly made our way back to our normal lives and the weekend kept replaying in the background.
What came back to me in those conversations was this. The last twenty five years of my life were seeded by the hopes of a twenty year old me. That twenty year old had dreams that were raw and unvarnished and entirely untarnished by the experience of how things actually go. And somewhere across the years that followed, those dreams did not disappear exactly. They just got quietly worked on. Edited. Shaped around what seemed possible. Adjusted to fit the contours of a career and a life as it actually unfolded.
I have come out the other side of those twenty five years with a lot of experience. Considerably more knowledge. Perhaps, if I am honest, a little wisdom, though others might disagree. These are real things and I value them.
But when I looked at it honestly after that weekend, I noticed something I had not looked at directly before. The seed. The original hope. Raw, unvarnished, asking nothing of itself except to be realised. That seed is almost absent now. And I am not sure when that happened.
The WhatsApp groups are still running. Weeks after the event, the messages keep coming. Photographs. Old memories that someone recovered and could not keep to themselves. Voice notes. The occasional call. The emotional connection that the weekend lit up has not gone quiet. Nobody wants it to.
That tells you something about what those two days actually were. Not a reunion exactly. More a reminder. Of what endures. Of what picked up without missing a beat across twenty five years. Of what was never really about the career or the title or any of the things we spend most of our year tending to.
The twenty year old who walked onto that campus in 1997 had no professional identity to speak of. No track record. No credentials to lead with. Just the person, unformed and unfinished, with a head full of dreams that had not yet learned to be realistic.
That version of me helped build everything that came after. The experience, the knowledge, the relationships, the work. All of it grew from that seed.
What I am taking from this weekend is not nostalgia. But whether the person who shows up for the next twenty five years still has access to that original seed. The hope that existed before it learned to be cautious. The dreams that were real before they were edited.
The friendships formed the answer in two days without trying. They picked up exactly where they were left. No credentials checked. No identity required. Just the people.
The next twenty five years need to pick up exactly from where they left that raw seed of hope twenty five years ago. They will have their own shape, their own demands, their own version of everything life decides to throw. But going into them with that seed recovered makes everything that follows more worthwhile, more adventurous, and more enjoyable. Whatever comes.
