Highly Qualified Idiots

 

Sometimes late at night, after replying to office emails nobody should be sending at 11:47 PM, a strange thought enters the mind.

What if everyone else is moving forward with life while I am still emotionally sitting in some hostel room from 2002 eating cold fried rice with three other idiots?

The boys from Wamrong who once survived on stolen chillies from the mess kitchen and smoked suspicious biris behind labour camp sheds are now respectable fathers giving motivational advice on social media. 

One fellow who nearly failed mathematics three times now posts investment tips every morning as if Warren Buffett personally trained him in Khaling.

Another friend who once climbed hostel roofs at midnight now complains about cholesterol and knee pain after climbing two stairs.

Life is a strange thing.

Then there are the engineering college friends.

The people you once spent entire days with drinking cheap tea and discussing music, girls, basketball, football and futures so grand you genuinely believed at least one of us would become internationally accomplished.

Nobody became internationally accomplished.

One became very good at forwarding emails.

One is in Melbourne now, surviving mostly through old memories.

The rest of us scattered around Perth pretending we understand superannuation and interest rates while secretly still feeling like confused engineering students inside.

One fellow who copied all his engineering exams with the confidence of a seasoned criminal now speaks about leadership and corporate vision as if he was born holding a whiteboard marker and a strategic plan.

Meanwhile all of us once survived on samosas and mishti, borrowed notes we never opened, panic before exams and last-minute prayers to every available deity before results came out.

But strangely, the most interesting friendships came after college.

Those Thimphu years.

God.

Those years felt alive.

Friends made after college in Thimphu somehow always ended up in endless drinking sessions that began with the most dangerous lie in Bhutanese history:

“Just one or two rounds only.”

Nobody ever stopped at one or two rounds.

Some nights began in small bars and ended with friends singing along to old Hindi songs from the car stereo late at night, voices so bad and so out of sync that even the car speakers probably wished they were stolen.

There were random drives around Thimphu with no destination.

Loud shouting in celebration of life and love while parked below Buddha Point, the car boot left open so music could escape into the night, followed by government-approved emotionally committed dancing outside the car, while we ate junk food and drank cheap whisky and wine coolers like deeply confused philosophers.

Weekends disappeared inside laughter, ara, whisky, beer cans and stories so impossible that even eyewitnesses now refuse to confirm them.

Those friends were different somehow.

By then everybody had already started becoming adults, but not fully.
People carried ambition, heartbreak, office stress, loneliness and dreams all mixed together.

And somehow that made the friendships deeper.

Some of those friends are now chiefs, doctors, managers, and business owners with very serious email signatures.

Yet when meeting some of them in Bhutan, within ten minutes everybody becomes exactly the same idiots again.

The distinguished chief suddenly becomes the same legend who turned one casual drinking session on Norzin Lam into a full Govinda tribute concert ending at Buddha Point.

The successful business owner becomes the person who once hid an entire emotional season behind a perfectly normal face.

And the doctor, now a respected specialist, still becomes the same love-triangle surgeon who could remove the other fellow’s chances without anaesthesia.

Nothing changes completely.

Even the Australia friends are like that.

One is in Melbourne, slowly becoming one of those friends preserved mostly through old memories rather than regular conversations.

The Perth friends still survive mostly through WhatsApp groups where everybody keeps saying, “We should catch up soon,” with the confidence of men who have been unsuccessfully trying to organise the same meetup for the last few years.

But somewhere underneath all that adulthood, the same people still exist.

Sometimes I wonder whether I quietly slipped out of my friends’ lives, or whether they slowly slipped out of mine.

Then I realise friendship does not always disappear loudly.

Sometimes people simply become busy building lives they once dreamed about together.

Still, strange things survive time.

Old nicknames.
Engineering jokes nobody else understands.
Late-night Thimphu memories.
Drunken promises.
Hostel photographs.
Songs from another life.

And certain friendships — even after years of silence — somehow continue exactly where they left off.