Catch-Up in Progress…

A backbencher’s overdue reply to time, technology, and friendship.

The other day, while earnestly pretending to “network” on LinkedIn (read: lurking), I sent a message to an old college classmate. You know those contacts you scroll past 37 times and finally think, Ah, what the heck. Let me say hi before our fingers get too shaky to type. That.

To my genuine delight, he responded. Warmly. Almost suspiciously warmly. You know the kind of reply that makes you think, Wait… Is this guy selling me crypto?

We used to sit next to each other on the back bench in college… the sacred last row. The Bermuda Triangle of academia. The headquarters of observation and commentary. A place of strategic invisibility and occasional nap attempts.

I’ve always been a backbencher. Not just by seat preference, but as a full-blown identity. A lifestyle. A philosophy. A bird’s-eye view of chaos with better air circulation.

From the back, you could see everything. The yawns, the side romances, the front-row overachievers who treated every lecture like a TED Talk.

And since I was one of the tallest in class, no one could stop me from being where I was meant to be… back there, blending into the wall and observing humanity in motion.

So there I was, decades later, scrolling through LinkedIn, toggling between serious posts about ghostwriting for CEOs and less serious thoughts like “Should I write an article titled ‘The Thought Leader’s Guide to Pretending to Read’?”

That’s when a flashback of memories swiped me back to a living room scene from my childhood.

It was a reunion of my father’s friends… all former residents of Calcutta, back when it was the largest and loudest city in India.

They had shared mess halls, cigarettes, and questionable bachelor decisions. Now they were older, louder, and spread across the globe, but reunited that day in our living room and brought Calcutta back with them with much nostalgia and no volume control.

I was upstairs, but their booming laughter and declarations of who drank what in which shady part of Park Street made it impossible not to eavesdrop.

That’s when I heard one of them casually announce: “In the US, every member of our family has their own car. All air-conditioned.”

Now let’s pause for context.

At the time, air-conditioned cars were a rare species… somewhere between unicorn and flying saucer.

In India, if your car had working air conditioning, you either had won the lottery or knew someone high up in the State Trading Corporation.

Imported cars came through government auctions, and I… armed with no money but infinite curiosity… would read those ads religiously.

Window shopping for dreams I couldn’t afford was a hobby. (That and silently judging people who drove Fiats without hubcaps.)

Some people collect stamps. I collected unpurchased dreams.

But beyond the automotive envy, what struck me was the bond between these men.

Some had climbed corporate mountains. Others had taken quieter trails. But when they laughed… you couldn’t tell which was which.

They laughed like they did when trousers were wider and hairlines lower.

Titles didn’t matter. Neither did time.

That feeling of friendships outlasting success and wrinkles… came back while speaking to my old friend.

After he left for the US post-college, we had actually written letters to each other. Honest-to-goodness handwritten letters. The kind that involved ink, stamps, envelopes, and a delivery timeline best suited for historical novels.

One letter would take 15 days to reach. A reply, another 15 days. Add procrastination, exam stress, and random power cuts, and soon each conversation had a turnaround time of about two months. In between, you could fall in love, fail a subject, or forget you’d ever written anything in the first place.

Eventually, the letters stopped… as letters do when you’re 22, broke, and distracted by whatever shiny object adulthood waves in front of you. Friendships didn’t end. They just… fell asleep.

Until now.

One message. One reply. One rekindled thread.

We laughed, swapped life updates, and promised to keep in touch again.

Of course, we know life will try its tricks. Schedules will snarl. Time zones will interfere.

But some connections, it turns out, are built on longer timelines… the kind that won’t panic when replies take a while.

And me? I guess I’m still a backbencher at heart… just with a veneer of a serious look and a fancier chair.