A while ago, I read a blog that delved into the nostalgia surrounding meetings with old friends. I've always loved using the word "bittersweet", and I think sometimes that it's the most apt word for such meetings. I met an old friend a few days ago, after two years , and heard about his plans to go abroad and his job and what he'd been up to in the two years since college ended. It was so hard to picture him in a suit and tie and dealing with clients, when I've seen him in ripped jeans and ultra-baggy t-shirts, knocking back tequila shot after tequila shot till he passed out on the bar. In my mind, at least, he'll be forever 18.

God, if only all of us could stay forever 18 and forever where we're happiest. For someone who's moved around as much as I have, I don't seem to deal too well with change...at least, change in the people I know. One of my best friends from my childhood, someone I've known since I was five and he was seven, got married six months ago. It was the most surreal experience in my life. You know you should be happy, you want to be happy; you have a smile on your face as you hear the news, but all you can remember is running in a three-legged race with him when you were six years old, both of you wearing matching red shorts and t-shirts. Bittersweet was the only thing that could come close to describing it. And he knew it too. Things, people, places, situations, even memories change irretrievably as we grow up and grow away. He still calls and we still talk a lot, but that niggling feeling of change is always there, that little curbing and adhering to propriety, which makes me sad, because God knows amongst friends we've never ever adhered to propriety! There's a different set of rules and boundaries that comes in, even if he's someone you always confided in, because he's a married man, and it's been years, and you're older, and everything grows and dissolves and changes and mutates till it makes your head hurt. And you look at this...this man, with stubble, and a leather briefcase, and a wife, and you can barely see a trace of the boy whom you made your queen when you wanted to be the king in games of make-believe. You know he's still there, but sometimes, it's hard to remember.

If life was perfect, we'd still all be in the college canteen, eating the best chinese food in Bombay and figuring out if we had enough money to go shoot a game of pool. None of this MBA, work, marriage and kids nonsense. There'd be this time warp, or a time loop, that would keep us there, over and over again, so we'd never age and never leave. Our own little Neverland, and we'd all be Peter Pan. Realistically, of course, life has to go on, and we have to make time and make way for more people and more memories and more nostalgia. It's never- ending. You keep giving your heart away, piece by piece, to the ones who leave an impact on you, and on some days, it's hard to remember which city you're in, who your friends-in-close-geographical-proximity are and who it is you miss with an ache.

The best thing, maybe, about all of this, is that they're still there. You meet or you don't, you talk or you don't, you keep in touch or you don't....but somewhere, 2 or 5 or 10 years down the line there's an impromptu meeting. And then there's the hugging and the laughing and the crying and the "Oh my God it's so good to see you!" and the little tugging at your heartstrings as you see and feel the changes, and you know that life actually is perfect, because time didn't stop, it went on and it brought you, somehow, to those people again, and you had the opportunity to use words like "nostalgia" and "bittersweet" when you looked at them and saw how they had changed so much, but not so much that you couldn't still love them.