It didn't matter to her anymore. She had a faint recollection of the years when the Republic Day mattered to her, but she had forgotten the last time it did. She did not want to wake up and rush to the television to watch the parade. She no longer felt that surging sense of pride in her breast on hearing patriotic songs. It was so much of a blank. She felt she had nothing to say on most occasions and was clueless about everything. A gregarious talker, she started realizing why and how people who were quiet managed it. Was this growing older? Was this becoming matured? She saw no sign of maturity in herself except an ebbing of the bubbling soda water sense of happiness that pervaded all her being at some now-forgotten time. As a friend of hers had commented, there was so much of life that was forgotten. Life suddenly seemed a big long blank, interspersed with sporadic lights of little memories. So many years had just gone by without leaving trace. For all intents and purposes, they might not have existed in her life. It felt like the blank months of PhD, with nothing to show for the fact that the days had come and gone. Like the fizz slowly dies out after opening a soda bottle, the spontaneous joyousness seemed to slowly fizzle out with the passing years. Most of life hardly seemed to matter. As a child, burdened with examinations, it had seemed, older people complained for nothing. They didn't have exams to give. If you didn't have exams every week, you had no stress in your life. Once one is through with these pestilential parakeets of writing answers, one is free to be happy. To the older her, it didn't quite seem so anymore. There were worse things in life than exams. Maybe that realization is the beginning of growing older. As Shaw would say, Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a pity it is wasted on the young.
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