Saroj Gopal Regmi:

Don’t you wish you had a time machine to take you back to the past? I guess there is a universal appeal for moving in the past to change or erase that bit of your life which you never liked. Like everyone else, I feel the same. I want to go back to the past and enjoy life like the way I never did then. When I was a kid, I was different from the pack. While other children my age were busy playing with plastic airplanes at the age of five, I used to wake up early memorising the capitals of other countries. I used to rote learn books and used to study hard. I didn’t even have to study at what is now fashionably referred as “nursery” because I had studied everything at home very young. Then with the rise in classes came competition and competitors. I always strived to be at the top of my class from my childhood because I was taught by this world that it was rewarding to be first, to be a winner.

Therefore, it was all studies, classes, and books for me before I realised that childhood was an altogether different realm for me, that it was too seriously spent that it ought to have been. Suddenly, I grew up and slowly started realising that things got tougher and tougher. I realised that I wasted such an important part of my life uselessly. I didn’t play enough and didn’t engage in any sweet little prank when I was young. I can only look back and regret the way I spent my childhood. Whenever I watch toddlers on television playing, I realise what I missed. And when my frie nds tell me stories of their playful childhood, I ask myself why don’t I have such a story to tell. Why am I just like an empty bottle having nothing but emptiness inside? I had to pay a big price for my studies and had to even lose a vital element of my childhood. Now when I see young kids studying, I tell their parents to make sure that they don’t let their children miss a vital part of life just by studying. Everything has time and I guess childhood is the time to enjoy and have fun rather than memorise the bag full of books.

A lot of people call me childish and I honestly don’t feel intimidated by their judgment. I think it was probably because I still want to experience my childhood in a different way again. I just want to go back to those days of playfulness and play with toys and get lost within my own small childish world. I don’t want to grow up again because the more grown I become the more dull life becomes. I want to turn back time and get my childhood back.