Sea Breeze

I was reading a few blogs today. Mostly links from the section A website. Most of them who had lived on the coast seemed to have very fond memories of the beach. I too have fond memories. I remember when I was a kid I used to get up early in the morning and go for a walk with my dad and brother to the campus of the Theosophical Society. It was a really beautiful quiet place and in those days, before they fenced it off, you could still walk through the campus to the beach. The beauty of the beach was that it was a little distance away was an estuary where a now almost extinct river flowed into the sea. There was actually a broken bridge across the river at this place. I once walked up this bridge with my brother. Then later in life I used to play cricket and Frisbee there. Just as I was savouring the nostalgia, Phaedrus walked in, with his usual "give it a damn" attitude.

"Hey Phaedrus aren’t u mugging, for your business law exam tomorrow"
"Well I was awake for most of the classes so I think ill pass"
That was Phaedrus for you. Always the cowboy shooting from the hip. I wondered if he had ever heard about words like 'preparation' or 'studying'. I confess I am not systematic or very academically oriented but at least I studied for exams.
So I asked him: "Why is it that you never study?"
"I do, it’s just that I don’t desperately cram like you do. In fact I do that too when the exam is important enough."
This was the end term exam with 50% weightage. I wondered how important the exam would have to be to make Phaedrus 'desperately cram' for it.
"Well, I studied for my board exams", he said thoughtfully.
"That was 6 years ago"
"I studied for Engineering entrance, GRE, CAT...”
"Ok ok I get the picture."
Then conversation then wandered on to CAT and whether it was really a good way to choose people for a management program. We then had one of those usual pretentious psuedo-intellectual discussion about the "state of the world"- India's education system, reservation, b-schools, Iraq, world peace etc. Once we had had our fill of this Phaedrus decided to leave. As an after thought I just asked him
"Have u ever been to a beach."
"Of Course I have. In fact I grew up pretty close to one"
This was news to me. I didn’t know Phaedrus grew up close to a beach. In fact I didn’t know much about his past.
"I used to spend a lot of my time there. It was a big commercial kind of beach with a lot of people around, though not in a crowded kind of way. I used to walk there from home, it was a longish sort of a walk but I enjoyed it. Maybe I enjoyed the walk more than the beach itself. But anyway I just used to go there and sit and walk up and down. Sometimes grab a smoke or two."
"You used to smoke?"
"Yeah but I quit...but what I really enjoyed about the beach was sitting on the shore and staring into the wide open ocean, sometimes watching the waves, sometimes the sunset. It was nice to contrast the beach with the ocean. The beach dirty with a lot of people. The ocean blue and open. A vast expanse. And there was the sound of waves. Extolled by poets since the beginning of poetry. Never ending, with some unfathomable kind of rhythm. The sea is so representative. So metaphorical... You know some theories suggest that man's first migration out of Africa was along the coast. It seems beach combing provided early man with enough to subsist on."
"So it’s not surprising that we like the beach so much", I interrupted trying to stop his from launching into one of his techno-philosophical lectures.
"No, but that might not be the reason. You see the sea somehow brings hope. It’s like life. There’s a vast blue expanse and you can’t see beyond a point. You can go anywhere you want. There are no roads on the sea. No traffic signals. No buildings. It’s also dangerous and powerful..."
Powerful statements. We both stopped talking and though about this for some time. I had heard this metaphor before. Not from Phaedrus though. It was a well know pop-psychology connection. Life and the open ocean. The silence continued for some time and then Phaedrus got up to leave.
"Chalo yaar I need to sleep I have an exam tomorrow"
"Ok see you around."