Holi-Days

Holi is usually a very vibrant time on campus. Especially when it occurs midweek. The only thing I look forward to, since I’m a little averse to how much Holi one can play, is the thandai they prepare in the mess for us each year. I’m looking forward to that this year as well. However, University declared the Monday before Holi (tomorrow) a holiday. That has meant a 4-day long weekend, and most people have taken advantage of this to take trips and go places – or to go home and visit their families. I wasn’t too interested in travel, given my music exam and my general lazy desire to spend time on campus as much as possible – to enjoy all of it before we graduate. Campus is incredibly dead though, and it reminds me of some of the nicest time I spent here, back in December 2017.

The quiet and long weekend also offers the opportunity to use time however you wish. I spent my entire day reading The Chronicles of Narnia, aside from doing the work that I needed to get done and ticking off things on my OneNote to-do list. [I love OneNote and it has dramatically changed my life, but more about that later]

Narnia was a world I was not introduced to when the movie came out in 2005. I was deemed too young to be exposed to that genre of film, and ended up watching the movie to prepare for my watching of Prince Caspian. Prince Caspian released the day my Grade 5 final exams ended in 2008, the same year we relocated from Dubai to Bangalore. To celebrate, my mother allowed me to invite all my friends to my house [we broke the curtain rod, which disappointed me] and took all of us out to Al-Ghurair Mall to watch Prince Caspian in the evening. We were understandably an excited bunch of 10-12 year olds. My mother and my uncle knew nothing about Prince Caspian, and I remember them cluelessly looking to us to try to understand our joy at the return to Narnia and all of the adventures the Royals went on through the entire show. My mom also did this incredible thing [I really do not know when], where she made us take a photograph outside the Prince Caspian poster and made us all individual mugs with the photo on it.

My memory of Narnia is just that. That amazing day, filled with wonder. I didn’t watch the third movie. Today, Goodreads prompted me that The Chronicles were the most-read in the Fantasy genre this week, which was more than enough excuse to launch into myself.

What a fabulous day it has been. I’ve been sitting on my laptop, in my room, yet transported with each book into a new adventure. Launched into a world other than my own. Narnia fulfilled everything that good fiction books have done for me. They’ve all allowed me to live a life that’s removed from the life I live here. Another planet, almost, where anything appears possible, and chapter on chapter, the unimaginable takes place.

Love that fifth year is giving me so much time and reason to read.