When I was a kid I wanted to be a pilot. I have tried looking back in time to find the reason for it. A reason for the thought was the place we were living in. It had an Air Force station nearby. I would see helicopters once a week. I was mesmerized by it. Back then flights were rare. Whenever I saw the long cloudy trail in the sky, I would follow it to trace the flight. The small blip in the sky would enthrall me. I wanted to fly high up in the sky.
My parents used to take me to the functions organized by the Air Force for civilians. In it, they would have stalls showcasing models of the various fighter jets and helicopters in the fleet. On the last day, a helicopter would come and land in the middle of the ground in which the event was happening. The ground would be full on that particular day. The whole thing of a helicopter coming and landing and coming to a standstill was such an awesome scene for me. Up to a certain age, my father would pull me up and place me on his strong shoulders. I would get the best view. When I grew I would manage to wriggle and make my way through the crowd to find a place for myself at the front. They knew I loved planes and would buy me some toy figurines before we left.
Then Top Gun happened. I don't know the exact year. I even forgot the year it was released. I saw it on a night out at my friend's place. He had managed to get permission from his parents to watch the movie when it aired late at night. Since I had seen it on TV it must have been a couple of years after its theatrical release. I must have been in my third or fourth standard. I can't recollect it. I only remember getting into bed, pulling up the blanket, and making myself cozy with my friends.
Top Gun was the movie that made me adore and love planes with all my heart. The epic stunts shown in it gave me goosebumps. Although I don't remember the movie completely I know the gist of it. In the end, Tom Cruise saves the day and becomes a hero. He was fierce and had a particular swag to him that was very appealing. The whole bunch who say the movie that night remembers it to date. We were hanging onto our blankets when those fighters took tight turns. We panicked when Tom lost control of his jet and began to spin. We prayed that they survive. But Moose had to die. It was very saddening. We were feeling what Tom was feeling. I think I cried when he was being buried.
It is said Tom Cruise was the one to popularise aviator sunglasses that have become a trademark of the aviators. I didn’t know this. One of my colleagues shared this info when we were talking about movies. The second part of the movie is slated to release later this year, nearly thirty years after the first one. I am excited about it. To see Maverick reprise his role as the most awesome fighter pilot in the US Navy is something I would shell out my money for in an instant. I hope the script is good. The story takes place some thirty years after the first movie, making it somewhat relatable to our times. That is good in a way. I don't want to see Tom Cruise doing a younger role. He is amazing the way he is now and I want him to remain like that in the movie.
I was hooked on the music. Back in my childhood days, it was difficult to get the soundtrack of a movie. Only albums by music bands would be released in audio cassettes. My friend's elder brother was the one who collected English music back then. In my home, my father would get all these Malayalam movie audio cassettes. They were the ones to be played on weekends in our audio player. He had a lot of them. Sometimes he would bring in Bollywood movie songs too.
When I was in college, the movie came up in one of our conversations. The first thing that came into my mind was the stunts performed by the jets along with their trademark music. On reaching back to my hostel that night, I immediately searched for the soundtrack of the movie on the internet. I found it without much hassle. I downloaded them and loaded them into my music player. They were in the loop for the entire week. The fast-paced one is called Danger Zone. The title is apt for the feeling it gives to the listener. The slow love song is called Take my breath away by Berlin. I love that song. It is smooth. I don't remember the visualization of it in the movie, the complete one. I just remember Tom being with the actress and riding his bike during the song.
As I kid, having been enthralled by the movie and wanting to do something daredevil like him, the only outlet for me was video games. I got my first video game system when I was seven years old. It was a generic model that used game cassettes having 8-bit games preloaded. I was introduced to the world of Contra, Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, and various other memorable characters. It was the time when all my friends were getting video games. We would trade our game cassettes after finishing the game ourselves. These machines were simple ones. They didn’t have any memory to store saved states of the game and restore them at some other time. If one had to finish a game then he has to sit and play it in one stretch. We used to do that on holidays or weekends. Also, we would pray that the power doesn’t go off. Back then there were no inverters for backup. A power cut during a crucial moment of a game meant restarting it from the beginning. It was a really frustrating thing. But we never gave up. The moment power is restored we got back to playing it once again.
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In one of the game cassettes I got from my friend, there was a game based on Top Gun. I was so excited to play it. It was fun. You were a fighter pilot on a mission to destroy the bad guys. You got your guns and sidewinder missiles and off you took to the skies. The viewpoint was from inside the cockpit. This was very exciting. I had played other plane games. But none of them gave this first-person view. All of them had us control the plane from a third-person perspective.
I never excelled in the game even though I tried a lot. Firstly I couldn’t understand it much because the language used in it was a mix of English and Chinese. I have the memory of seeing the name sidewinder on the TV screen. Rest I don't remember. Most of the time I used to die by being prey to the small bombs the enemy jet would throw out from its rear. I don't have a good memory of it. I remember watching my friend trying to land in the aircraft carrier. That is how the level ends. I never reached that far.
When I got my first computer I installed a couple of flying games on it. One of them was set in the World War One time period. You are a fighter pilot and you had to fly the vintage propeller aircraft of the two factions as part of the campaign. The graphics were awesome when compared to the 8-bit games I had played for the larger part of my childhood. Also, the last flying game I played was Top Gun some six years back. It was so much cooler than that. By now the controls had gotten tougher. I had to memorize what the keys did. It took only a day for me to get used to it and play it for hours at a stretch. My mother used to scold me for the excessive amount I to spend in front of the screen.
Up to my tenth standard, I thought I would take the path to becoming a pilot. Becoming a commercial one meant shelling out a huge amount of money. We didn’t have that much to spare. The alternative was to join the Air Force and become a pilot there.
But fate had something else for me. It was a time when engineering was booming. The IT industry had been established in the state and the country. A lot of jobs were being created by them. They were well-paying jobs. People were flocking to join the big IT companies straight after college. They would come and recruit in mass. People were happy with the package they were getting. It was much better than the ones being offered by the core engineering companies.
I met a super senior from our college when we were traveling back to college in our first year. He had passed out three years ago but had a couple of back papers. He was telling us his story. He got placed in a core company and was doing a job that was very much related to all that he had studied and was interested in. I didn’t have much clue about all this. We were new to college and had no idea of what we had to expect from it. The senior was coming back to college to write his supplementary exam to clear his final paper. We had known that having back papers disqualified you from sitting for campus placement drives. He agreed to it but also added that when the placement drives were taking place in his final year most of the class including the toppers opted for IT jobs instead of core industry jobs. As such the company that he is now had to include students with backlog to sit for the recruitment process as they needed quality engineers. Later on, when I recalled this story with the friends I was traveling with that day, we understood how lucky he was.
When our time came the core engineering jobs became in demand and the IT jobs started to lose their sheen. They were also not able to pay as much as the core ones. It did help the ones who were struggling to get a job. The toppers had their eyes on the core jobs. They wanted to stay in the field in which they had invested their four years and take it forward from there.
I sometimes wonder how different life would have been had I managed to get into the armed forces at that young age. I heard a lot of stories about the kind of life it is in there. It is rough and tough. I am not made for it. I think I would have been disqualified in the medical phase. I am actually not made up for such a tough and challenging job. I am more of a 9-to-5 person. I know my current job is not along those lines, but still.
I reach the main entrance of the college. An empty college front greets me. College of Engineering, Trivandrum is written in bold letters on the plaque posted right in the middle of the entrance. To its right in one corner is a tall wall having a barren look in which the college name and accreditation are written. A lot of political banners can be seen surrounding these two plaques. Standing at an elevated space from the main entrance to the campus is the main building. There on top of it, the college name is written in an old font. It gives off a feeling of pride and heritage. The lush greenery all around it makes it even more beautiful.
Even with all the silence surrounding me and the absence of a single human being on the premises, the college and its surroundings give a positive vibe. It makes me feel happy. I have a small smile on my face. I am transported back to my golden college days. My smile widens to a big grin. I kill the scooter engine, get out of it, and walk towards the entrance. It is good to be back in the place that made me.