Unbeing dead isn't being alive

So, like each year, this year's course of international trade ended in August. And, like each year, students asked if I will be offering more courses. And, like each year, I told them what all I can but I won't offer. But unlike each year, our conversations didn't fizzle out. Some students made a WhatsApp group and we continued our discussions on *life, the universe and everything* - from geopolitics to batch politics, from economic gap to generation gap, and from campus food to *the restaurant at the end of the universe*. 

And we were not limited to WhatsApp only. Like an old man, ^no one should be alone in their old age^, I thought. And hence, we met every once in a while. And as the boys were exhausted after the last CAT, we met on the following Monday. At my home. With Snacks. From Adda. And coffee. Home-made. And we had free-wheeling chat for, maybe, 3 hours. Or may, a decade. I don't know. But we talked a lot. Or rather, I talked a lot and the guys were sweet enough to tolerate me for mere samosas! 

Anyway, our discussions drifted from CAT and career prospects to culture at IIMs to country's culture! And perhaps many other things in between. And in that flow of discussions, someone asked - Why do some people drift away? In that moment, a thousand thoughts and a million memories whirled away through my mind. I answered him something. Perhaps something like - well, people grow apart. Sometimes, their use for each other comes to an end. Sometimes they get too busy in their new life. Sometimes, they want to get rid of their old life. Sometimes people burn the bridges. Sometimes their own "karma" burns those bridges. Sometimes, relationships are killed actively and sometimes it dies of that passive disinterest. 

Maybe I didn't say any of it. But I thought of it all. And then I thought of something even worse. You know, it is good that sometimes, people drift away. You know, it is worse that sometimes, the relationships die and yet, people do not drift away. We just keep walking with a dead relationship on our shoulders and keep dying each day with a dead relationship on our heads. Perhaps it is better to drift away than to die each day. And yet, here I am with so many of them.

P.S. - To make sense of * and ^, you may want to read, respectively,  The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy and The Old Man and The Sea.