stanford with a new pair of eyes!

today, i’m in stanford after 6 months. what an unnatural thing to do - to not visit stanford for 6 months. afterall, this was my first home here! and it is, in some measure, an experience equivalent to my first trip back home, to bangalore after having lived in the u.s. for a year and a half. a very, very surreal experience. i’m pretty crazy about such experiences, actually. they fascinate me. in fact (although i haven’t done it so far), i could probably even go so far as to deliberately avoid an oft-visited place and then visit it again one fine day just to see how i feel about it ;)

it is SO interesting to compare what you thought of the things you saw - people, trees, buildings, roads, and other inanimate objects and how you perceived them then, with how you perceive them now. what the heck, one should at least be able to view objects objectively. but no! :D one thing for sure is that stanford looks more beautiful to me today than it ever did… possibly cuz i'm here sans the stress bug that was always with me while i was there (wish i hadn't been such an idiot).

i feel like a zombie, walking around slowly, looking around the place and visiting the familiar areas and paths that i had haunted during my previous life (or something like that). and i suddenly find myself calling a, my first ever trusted friend, or family, actually, in stanford. afterall, it's the earliest memories that one's usually flooded with. i think i must've disturbed her during an important meeting, cuz she cut my call :p

i’m sitting in meyer library right now, looking at students hard at work. apparently, the exams are going on. typical, random students doing random things :) one guy completely bent over his books and looking into them, lest he lose concentration – i really wonder whether he can see one image, or two, of the words in his book. another in a stanford sweatshirt, obviously sleep-deprived, so he’s completely horizontal and fast asleep on one of the couches and is probably dreaming about his (brief) post-exam days right now. another girl’s sitting cross-legged on one of the couches, and is surrounded by books, papers, pens, pencils, a laptop, an ipod, wires, food and drinks – she looks like she was born and raised on that couch :D. familiar scene. i must have looked like one of these at some point in time. i’m sitting on a couch right now and looking at the other couches – i recognize the designs and patterns on the tapestries. some faces look familiar too. it’s raining outside, and i just got up to see if i could get a hot cup of tea/coffee… but alas! moon beans cafe is closed (no, no don’t worry, not for good - today's a saturday). and i can hear the clock tower ringing every fifteen minutes announcing some fast-approaching impending doom ;)

everything looks very familiar, and yet very different. i think i now totally understand what it means to have lived in a bubble. i lived in the stanford bubble, and it looks totally different from the outside.