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I stretched my sore feet, squishing my toes together, rotating my ankles one by one as I balanced myself on one foot and then the other.  Around me swayed the alumni, present students and professors, celebrating ten years of ISB, at the concert to commemorate Solstice 2011, the annual alumni event. The concert was the last of the scheduled events, barring a party and I had been on my feet all day. I had a shoe bite. I stepped out of my sandals and could feel my feet relax as they sank into the plush grass of the lovingly-tended ISB recreation centre lawns. With my sandals in hand, the cool grass between my toes, the music and the magic washed over me, I looked around and through the drifting smoke and jewel-like flashing lights I saw that for one brief moment there was no moment beyond this moment, there were no assignments to write, no groups to negotiate meeting times with, no jobs to compete for, no enmities to nurse. For one moment under the cold dark sky cleaved by the ivory moon, we stood with the stars in our eyes, friends happy to be  part of each other’s lives, happy to have studied with such phenomenal talent, happy to just be us, here and now, smiling and laughing, feeling the pulse, the blood rushing through our veins.  At that moment, with students from the founding batch, with people through all he years of who’ve passed through the halls we study in every day, who’ve laughed the nights away in our quads long before we moved in, who made ISB theirs much before it was ours, I realized what I was part of. It’s easy to lose track of that at ISB, with no senior class to give us a sense of continuity. We feel like we are discovering everything for the first time, and that everything is an experience unique to us. We are convinced that we are explorers of the unknown. Except, we are not. We are part of a larger narrative that began ten years ago with two student villages that now encompasses two campuses. We have a history and we have a future, hopefully a bright one.

I’m a sentimental person, so Solstice 2011 for me will always be a montage of unforgettable vignettes: couple of us stragglers from the flash mob practice session in the atrium at 2:30 a.m skating around the polished floor, dancing aimlessly, pretending to be bulls in a ring; lying on my bed in my SV1 quad and listening to the notes of Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasia’s flute drifting through the open windows; being submerged in foam at the ‘08 Lounge and then drying off by the bonfire; claiming the last plate of vegetarian tikkas at the Foam Party, which turned out to be delicious roasted baby potatoes; discussing the recruiting scenario with a visiting alum who sagely advised against pickiness when it came to employment in recession time – an instantly sobering conversation amidst the merriment; dancing like a dervish and shooting the Breeze(rs); watching my friends zorb and realizing I’d have to pass because I couldn’t hand being suspended upside down inside a plastic ball rolling down a slope.

In a few months, all of this is going to seem distant and foggy. We will be in new jobs, in new lives, meeting new friends and Solstice will only be a memory. We’ll forget the details, but I don’t think I’ll forget the way I felt: Happy.

- Avanija Sundaramurti, Class of 2012