Life with Archie & Gang

“You know that Archie Gang is inspired by a real bunch of people somewhere in the US…, even the ‘Bee’ is an actual high school principal”. I was like “no wayy dude..”, but he kept on going with that load of crap. He even goes to the extreme by saying, “Our principal should be like him and I wish we all had lives like the people in that gang. Hey you could even be Moose!” 6 years ago, during 10th grade in an Indian school back there in Doha, it seemed like a bunch of crap coming from a skinny little fellow who was my classmate. He left a year later to Canada, and probably got his little pipe dream over there.

Life in my school was tough, with its ‘thrust on academics, no time for fun’ rules and a strict policy against fraternizing with the opposite sex (We had separate buildings and facilities). Given all that, those years were the best years of my life. There is a special attachment to your fellow man, and there were so many things that you just can’t do in class if you were in co-ed (open swearing, et all..). I started having a decent social life by the time I hit 11th and 12th grade, all of which were outside the walls of my school. The last day of school, and one thought races through my mind – “School’s over and college is gonna be a blast, so much better than this rotten place…”. It never did.

Here I am, sitting at home, a week away from my next trip to Doha, just waiting for one more punishing year of college to get over with. Some bastard stole my phone at the hostel, I am dead tired working my ass off for a few college events and I have so much work pending. With all that, a grim feeling of a shattered dream I had back in school of a better life in college… something on the lines of Archie and his gang himself. Maybe I could have been Archie, or heck even Moose or Dilton. We would have fun, hanging around at our ‘chocklit shoppe’ and generally screwing around. Too bad I have no gang and no ‘chocklit shoppe’ either.

Thank god I’ll be back home on Saturday.