The longing

There was a girl who loved to read, and draw.  Education wasn't just the grades she scored in school, or the degrees that were attached to her name. For her,  Knowledge was great. It was an all-consuming greed: to find out everything there was to know- the sciences and mathematics, art and design, literature and languages.

Despite her degrees in Architecture and Visual Communications, her love for challenges, and her passion for design detail, gave her the courage to plunge into the newly emerging IT industry at the turn of the century and soon she was designing online user experiences . The IT industry gave her wings, literally. She travelled internationally for her project assignments. And one such short trip was to the UK in the early spring of 2007.

On a particularly sunny April weekend, she visited the legendary town of Cambridge. 

She  rode the open top tourist buses,
and then she walked the streets,
and the little alleys
and labyrinthine by-lanes of the colleges.







That Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
the river Cam with its quaint "Mathematical" bridge... the weeping willows and punts, the colleges, big and small, the market, even the bustling tourists..

As she explored Cambridge, it slowly cast a spell on her, an enchanting voice in her head beckoning her to stay back and be part of it.

She wanted to quit her job there and then. She wanted to live in that beautiful town, reading, studying, floating on the punts absorbed in her favourite books, soaking in the architecture of the buildings, and the knowledge in the air.
It wasn't the glamour of a foreign degree; it was a deep longing that sprang from love at first sight. This was her destination for the fine arts, design and literature.

Dusk seemed to arrive too soon that day and she had to return. Before she left, she tossed a coin into the River Cam making a silly yet sincere secret promise to come back. And stay there, for a year or two. Or maybe much longer. Someday.