Remembering my dad

 I've had the opportunity these past two days to spend a couple of hours at IITM. My father did his B.Tech and M.Tech there in the late 60s- early 70s. 

For some reason,  when I was doing my B.Tech in Anna Uni opposite IITM, neither he nor I thought about going to the IITM campus to see what he did and where and how things might have changed 30/35 years later. I never went to IITM by myself during those 4 years either.  

He didn't tell me much about his years there (and I didn't ask... most teenagers/ early 20s new adults feel no great curiosity about their parents' lives and I think we have established over the course of this blog that I'm fairly self- absorbed).

 Now that they are both in a different realm,  I wonder a great deal about their early lives and the choices they made and wish I could have the opportunity for easy conversations that I have with my friends.  

As I explored the campus, shrouded in a thin mist but not particularly cold,  early today morning,  I marveled at the giant banyans, the blackbucks and the white spotted deer. These trees must be a few hundred years old... my dad must have walked past them.  Some buildings, including Chemical Engineering, his major,  look to be the squat old buildings of the 70s..I wonder if he too, like so many students today,  cycled back and forth between his hostel and dept, or if he preferred to walk,  as he did in his later years.

He must have mentioned the name of his hostel at some point,  especially during the single reunion he attended a year or so before his death,  but in the long list of hostel names on the road signs, I couldn't recall it.  

He had told me about how, for his M.Tech thesis,  he had to use a computer, which in those days was as long as a room and would be housed across the main road in the Uni of Madras campus.  He would use punch cards. It would take him a few hours to punch holes in the card in IITM, then he would go to Uni of Madras (would have to reserve the computer ahead of time), and then feed the punch card into the machine and return the next day for his computations.  

Huh.

I also found out, the hard way,  that the distance between his likely dept at IITM and the likely dept at Uni of Madras (where the computer must have been) is not exactly an easy walk... must have been at least 3km one way 

My mom and grandmother had told me that he never actually wanted to become an engineer.  He was interested in medicine.  And my uncle,  Sampath, who did Medicine actually wanted to be an engineer.  Ani,  who resembles my father a great deal in looks and personality,  likes neither.  He likes cooking and food.  My father also used to like cooking. He would make the same elaborate plans for menus and ways of cooking that I see Ani make these days.  

This rather unexpected trip made me reflect on my father's life and choices. It also underscored to me that while our kids may have very different preferences to us,  there is still a familiarity to them.  Ani's desires for his life may seem unusual on the surface, but weirdly makes me feel closer to my dad.