Approaching Lights.

Did you ever try to have a look through back screen of your car at night, while waiting for the signal to turn green from red? You'll see clusters of lights approaching. Lights of different vehicles approaching you. If you shun your yes, you'll see them amalgamating into one luminous beam. While looking at those cluster of yellow sparks, you can never measure how far they are, and how long will they take to reach you. But as you blink once or twice, here they will be. Vehicles, stopping one by one beside yours one, like falling stars. And, there you will realize, time runs with inexplicable speed.  

The moment when all so spontaneously, you and your siblings start to sing the song along once it's playing from the favorite part of the chorus. Eventually you stop singing like the moment never happened. And the moment is gone. The moment when you are waiting to meet a friend all so anxiously for months, and there you meet her. And the next day, all you are left with is amazement how time can turn you so blind. The moment an awesome day can turn into pathetic one by a shot of a statement without even letting you have a chance to stop it.

I had been waiting for this Declamation Competition for so long. Perhaps that I didn't even realize that it was almost a month since I came to know about it and tomorrow is the final day and I am still without a speech. I sat on Word and tried typing but nothing came flowing in. Deleted. Typed again. And finally shut down the laptop before the frustrations hovered. I knew I would screw up tomorrow so I kept on changing sides to sleep but couldn't.

Mobile buzzed.

Text: "Would you want to participate with us in this Robotic Competition?"

Now THAT quietened me even more. Cause honestly, I am not that technical sort of engineer. I would rather spend my life studying than working. I didn't know what to go for. And with the help of two of my friends, I went for the latter one. Though I didn't know how long it would take me to consider the circuit designing, how the comparator works and how would I have to burn the program in that IC. Nights evaporated over our head and Days skimmed through, and we kept on working to make on Line-Tracker Robot that was supposed to follow this one white curved line in whole of an arena. With despair and a little but of chilly hope, we kept on working and one day I woke up and realized it was Today. Final day to strike the final move.
We went. We screwed up our circuit there. We recalibrated it. Rebuild it in an hour. Re did it all over again. And there we were, out of 30, we passed to quarter finals.
The feelings of being praised over a talent and praised over a skill are WAY DIFFERENT from each other. I didn't realize that the day was over, and Robot was all gone, and fun was all deep in some pith of memory chamber of my head, until I found myself typing about it, now.

I can see, that the moments most awaited vanish as fast as they can, to go un noticed, totally. Just like the approaching lights. I didn't realize when the signal turned green and all lights beside and behind me were gone. Didn't realize that we, the bunch of 8 brains, stopped signing the song in chorus of fun, while our Robot's speed reduced to lesser than a snail's. Fun times vanish so soon, right? i already miss the afternoon and the voices we made when our robot struggled to run.

The moment is long gone.
Like many moments, I yearn to re live again.
Many, many and many of them.
I wish I could measure how long it will take the lights to approach me, so that I could prepare myself to live the awaited moment to it's fullest. Perhaps I did. Maybe, I could have more.


And Yes, you can call me an engineer now.