"Prasoon!Switch off that laptop and check whether you need these books or not. If not, I will give it to someone. I have never seen you reading any of these.Someone else will at-least use them." Telling this, my mom placed a cardboard of old records, books and rough sheets near me. Having no other go, I started checking the contents .I found my first article on 'Winners are not born but made' in between some old grammar books.I read through it and realized that my English was better than how it is now. I was sure that I would not find anything that I would like to keep with me or something I would like to cherish. But still, I was checking each book just to pass time. Just then, I saw a notebook carrying cute designs and the letters 'SLAMBOOK' on its cover.
Slambook , a book meant to get your dear ones write down their memories about you, which both love to cherish for the rest of their lives.It was my slambook which I had passed over to my classmates during the last days of my college. I had always believed that my college life had almost all the ingredients to make a tamil commercial masala entertainer. The only things missing were the emotional quotient and a fitting finale(Note: Don't ask about heroine, since heroines are only meant for songs in such masala entertainers, I completely ignored that part.:) Really :P). But the last few days in my college gave me these too. I still couldn't forget those days for many a reasons, one of them being 'slambook'.
During the last 30-40 days of our college, every stationery shop around college were having bundles of notes/books for sale and they were christened slambooks. They were found in every design and size,some of them looked like telephone directories, others like bounded maths notes.Whatever may be the size, however the paper quality may be, I feel no one would have agreed with even half the price at which those books were sold. But during those days, people were running from one shop to another to get the slambook of their dream(some had dreamed about the designs too). Some of my friends had brought sketches,glitter pens, stickers blah,blah to make it look special. Since I had no other important work, I had also run with them for these :)
Slamooks though meant to relive memories were creating fresh incidents/impacts which people wanted to cherish. People whom I had never seen awake after 10 pm even for exams, were awake till 3 am to get the perfect colour combination to pen down the introductory words in their slambook before giving it. I saw people spending their leisure times in writing one slam after another and reading what one had written about someone else.It was like a festival and we could have called it 'The SLAMFEST'. And like in every festival, this one too had generated its own chaos,jealousy,excitement with me being a witness to people not writing in certain slambooks, some were there who had torn off what they themselves wrote from their heart and there was one who was pretty different from all others, he had stapled the 4 and odd pages which I had written about him before he gave to others.
With my increased curiosity,I decided to be a part of the fest by getting a slambook, wrote some two lines and handed it over it to my classmates of the opposite gender.When I got it back, it indeed was a 'slam' book. Though each one had written their individual views and memories, the one thing which I found in common in all the entries in my slam book was "Do invite me for your marriage" :P. Apart from these, there were many advice, many thank yous,many definitions for Prasoon .I still could not stop laughing, when I read through the memories that my classmates wanted me to cherish.
"Amma! You can give away all the books and notes except this one 'My Slambook'. I will take it with me.". I will need it to get rid of my worries time and again as there could be no other article/magazine that could make me happy like this. Like everyone, I think myself high, but this small book reminds me how Prasoon was, at-least in others' eyes.
