The recollection

12:20 PM Priyanka 7 Comments

You know one of those scenes in an insanely emotional flick where the protagonist stumbles upon something, an object, a phrase and suddenly he has a detailed and accurate flashback of the story behind it, complete with dialogues and expressions. I never thought that were possible in real life. Needless to say, this post is about how wrong I was.


This morning, having trudged all the way to the library to carry on with my preparation for the university exams next week, I was pretty groggy and quite plainly stressed. I've always (like millions of other students) had a habit of highlighting my lecture notes. And there I was studying and highlighting my astronomy notes in yellow when a particular incident from my childhood came back to me like a flash and I stopped.

I was 6. Having submitted an article (more like a bunch of incoherent sentences about something stupid) for a little competition at school, I was told the previous week that it had won a place in my school magazine. I must've been thrilled. I don't remember. At a following event, our principal had read out the names of the winners in his speech, a copy of which was given to all present, which included my mother. That evening at home, she carefully laid out the speech on my desk and asked if she could borrow my yellow crayon. I nodded and handed it over. She then began looking through the 5-page speech. After a couple of moments I heard her go "ahhh!" as she made a thick yellow line over a particular stretch on the page using the yellow crayon. I had no idea what she was doing, but I was curious. So I leaned in and saw the line she had drawn over. It was the part of the principal's speech where he had announced my name. I still didn't get it. I looked up and asked her what the yellow color meant and she said "well it's a way of highlighting something important that you might wanna see again, only you won't have to search for it a second time!" I was swept off by this simple idea. To me, she was a genius.

Back in the library, still holding that yellow highlighter mid-air, I couldn't believe I had such a fresh account of that memory locked up in my mind somewhere. But having looked back 15 years into the past, I couldn't help but feel humbled and grateful for having all these right forces in my life. I mean I was like a handful of freshly kneaded dough, and thankfully I was shaped in the best ways possible by people who cared and still do. I put the highlighter back, grabbed my phone and got up.
"Where are you going?" my friend asked.
"Just need to call someone who taught me how to highlight."

You Might Also Like

7 precious thoughts..:

sriti said...

Strange enough, I read both ur and divyansh's blogs again today. Both were about memories, and they reminded me of a poem,

H.L.V Derozio's A Walk By Moonlight,
Yes; there are in the backward past
Soft hours to which we turn -
Hours which, at distance, mildly shine,
Shine on, but never burn.

I find this poetry v. beautiful..

sriti said...

Strange enough, I read both ur and divyansh's blogs again today. Both were about memories, and they reminded me of a poem,

H.L.V Derozio's A Walk By Moonlight,
Yes; there are in the backward past
Soft hours to which we turn -
Hours which, at distance, mildly shine,
Shine on, but never burn.

I find this poetry v. beautiful..

Priyanka said...

I hadn't come across those lines in so long! Thank you :)

Anonymous said...

You are so awesome! I don't believe I've read something like this before.
So nice to discover someone with some unique thoughts on this issue.
Seriously.. thank you for starting this up. This website is something that
is required on the web, someone with a little originality!
my web page > 2web.ma

Anonymous said...

I'm no longer certain where you're getting your information, but good topic.
I needs to spend some time learning much more or working out more.
Thanks for fantastic information I used to be searching for this info for my mission.
Also see my page > acne treatment

Anonymous said...

Hi, this weekend is good in favor of me, since this moment i am reading this wonderful informative piece of writing here at my residence.
My webpage ... how to dress for your body type

Anonymous said...

hello grlonthemuv.blogspot.com blogger discovered your site via yahoo but it was hard to find and I see you could have more visitors because there are not so many comments yet. I have found site which offer to dramatically increase traffic to your website http://mass-backlinks.com they claim they managed to get close to 4000 visitors/day using their services you could also get lot more targeted traffic from search engines as you have now. I used their services and got significantly more visitors to my website. Hope this helps :) They offer best services to increase website traffic at this website http://mass-backlinks.com