Memories, good or bad, are our only link to the past. It is wonderful the way our memory allows us the opportunity to relive the past and go back endlessly in time, to as far as we can remember. My mother and I were watching something on TV this afternoon. A lady in a bright yellow sari floated on to the screen as part of a TV commercial. Instantly, my mother went back 50 years in time and told me that her grandfather had gifted a frock to her, in exactly the same shade of yellow when she was about 6 or 7. She even remembered the frock’s fabric and the patterns, and that it was probably one of the last frocks that she wore. Immediately my father chipped in with an incident that had happened to him at a cinema theatre when he was about 6 or 7. I realised then, that without memories, we’d all be lost in the travails of time. If we think about the simple things that would tug at our lips and make us smile, memories of our early days will definitely be on this list. If we jog our memory to as far as back to our kindergarten days, playing in wet sand with a scoop and basket could be one of them. The simple act of thumbing through an old scrapbook or a photo album gives us profuse pleasure. We laugh to ourselves, pull our head back, close our eyes and reminisce or maybe even call the other person to talk about the memories together. There are 5 zones of emotion out of which just one is positive and since memories can be disturbing too, the catch is to be able to maintain the right balance between positive and negative memories. All said and done, memories let us relive the past. As someone rightly said “We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams”

The railway station almost always brings back memories of a particular train journey, when I was a kid. I vividly remember my father hoisting me up on to the upper berth of the air conditioned compartment where I settled down to read a book, holding it wrong side up, just to mimic my brother who was engrossed in another book. The memory of the picture that my mother clicked almost always tugs at my mouth. Like any school going kid, I used to look forward to train journeys with the anticipation of a mother bearing her first child. As I grew older, the thrill of looking out of the window with the wind blowing in my face, of craning out of the window to watch the train turn, of travelling over bridges with river water gushing underneath, of passing through pitch black tunnels, of being huddled on my mother’s lap, of card games and vocabulary building games, of listening to the vendor yell ‘Chaaaya, Kaapi’, soon became mundane. The exciting became humdrum. Little did I realise then, that I would have to travel 36 hours from college to get home for the holidays. Train conversations were different to and from home. The journey to college was filled with thoughtful conversations, conversations of a hope-filled new semester, of wistful longing for home, of nostalgia, of holiday experiences and more. The trip home, on the other hand was a ruckus with smiling faces all around, each making our own plans for a full 2 months at home. As the years passed, the train was soon to become my second home as I made numerous trips to home from the city I worked at. I still do. Huddled in the upper berth, conversations took a different turn. Talks of the why’s, what’s and how’s of life became the focus of discussions with friends, as we shared account of events pertaining to different phases of life. Time stood standstill, almost. During one such trip home, a friend and I were sharing our experiences at work. It was one of the most career-sensitive conversations, I’d ever had. The conversation continued till late into the night and when we finally decided to go to sleep, I realised that train journeys are there for a reason. Time that I would have otherwise spent indolently was now well spent. The best train journeys are when I travel alone, especially during the day. There is so much of solitary-time that otherwise is very difficult to get in a world in which the second and the minute hands race past before we even know it. We just have to figure out how to make the most of our train journeys!