In about a week's time, we go for the farewell to Manas.

Non-Gokhaleites, and by that I mean people who have not attended these parties, bear up with me. Some parts of what follows may be a little confusing, and the whole piece will make you go green, but that can't be helped. Any posts that come up over the next two months are going to deal exclusively with what goes on within the confines of heaven as we know it.

Je ne suis pas desole about it either.

Over the last two or three years, there's this tradition that's built up at Gokhale.

This is how the process works.

Juniors join in August, by the first week or so. They're ragged… well, in a manner of speaking… for about three weeks, at the end of which they're taken to this place called Manas by their Seniors.

Manas, you see, is a bit of a misnomer. Manas is what lies off the road leading to Mulshi, on the left. Beyond Manas is a lake. At the other end of which lies a smaller place called Sarovar. Which (phew!) is where the action takes place.

It's a fairly secluded place, bordering on the lake, with a comfortably rustic lawn that leads on to what passes for a dance floor. Given that hardly anybody else comes to the place, it makes for a fantastic party venue.

Be as loud as you like, get as drunk as you want, eat as much as you can, and be escorted out of the place, ecstatically euphoric, and having fallen in love with all that is Gokhale , at around one in the morning.

Well, that, in a nutshell, is what happened to me.

Remind me to expand upon it sometime later. There are people who believe the tale is worth the telling.

And then you spend the rest of the year in a happy haze at Gokhale, dodging tutorials, bunking lectures, getting drunk on weekends, pretending to study for the sem-ends, giving and taking gyaan about fantastically irrelevant stuff, making pilgrimages to Apache (remind me to expand upon this as well), and generally speaking, living the good life until the time comes to bid adieu to your Seniors. Who, of course, have been praying long and hard for the tradition to continue.

So sometime in April, the proud successors of Attila the Hun make their way to Manas, pillage, loot and plunder, and make merry in much the same manner.

Towards the end though, reality knocks at the door.

Somebody, either a Senior or a Junior, looks around. Sees people he's fallen in love with over the last year. Sure, there have been quarrels, and there have been tiffs. But by and large, these guys have been there for each other, come what may. Life's been great, it's been fantastic.

And then it hits.

The reason this party is there, that person's brain tells him, through the alcoholic haze that it wallows in, is because all of what has been happening over the last year will cease to be in a month's time. Half the batch shall go their own way, occupied with whatever it is that they shall be doing in the next life, while the Juniors, although set to return to Gokhale, must renew their love affair with a new batch.

This, what is going on now, will go away forever.

And that person begins to cry.

It's been scientifically proven (well, I don't know whether it has. Seems to be a no-brainer.) that extreme emotions are contagious in times of utter inebriation.

Gokhalespeak: When drunk, if one laughs, all laugh. If one cries, all cry.

That leaves you with seventy people (by and large) who now decide to go about hugging everything that moves, and bawling their hearts out.

It ends with everybody left with their own memories, lying around on the dance floor, with Pink Floyd dishing out "Coming Back To Life" time and time again.

Finito.

There's a part of me that wants to go to Manas, and there's a part of me that'd rather not.

You know what I mean, surely.