Love Before the Blue Tick

Why school romance in the 90s was perhaps the purest love we ever knew

There was a time when falling in love required no profile picture, no carefully worded introduction and certainly no internet connection. It happened in classrooms. In corridors. At the school gate,at school desks at the playgrounds. 

Sometimes, it happened without either person knowing that it had happened at all.

The 1990s belonged to a different rhythm of life. The world was slower, and so were its emotions. There was time to wait for a letter, time to memorize a telephone number, time to wonder whether a smile meant something, and time to miss someone without immediately finding a way to reach them. The summer vaccations were quite blend of solitude and melancholy 

Perhaps that is why school romance from that era occupies such a peculiar corner in our collective memory. It was not necessarily more successful. It was not necessarily more lasting. But it was undeniably more innocent.

And innocence has a way of making even ordinary memories look beautiful decades later.

Before love became a conversation, it was an observation

In the 90s, attraction rarely announced itself. There was no direct message waiting to be sent. No carefully selected photograph to attract attention. No digital trail of likes and reactions from which feelings could be decoded.

One simply noticed someone.

• The way they entered the classroom.
• The art of looking at them from the corner of the eye.
• The smile exchanged (which btw way very different than the rest. It was like an alogrithm only lovers decoded)
• The way they laughed with their friends.
• The way they stood during morning assembly.
• The way they answered a question.
• The way they looked when they didn't know the teacher was watching.
• The way they waved eachout bye at the end of the school.

And then, almost imperceptibly, noticing became looking. Looking became waiting. And waiting became something nobody had a name for.

That was perhaps the first lesson of school romance: feelings could grow without being spoken.

The architecture of a school made romance possible

Every school had its own geography of affection.

The classroom had its preferred benches. The corridor had its familiar corners. The library had its quietness. The staircase had its accidental encounters. The school gate had its daily departures. These places were ordinary to everyone else. They became extraordinary to those who had begun attaching emotions to them.

A particular corridor could suddenly acquire significance because someone often walked through it. A particular period could become the favourite because it was followed by lunch.

The school playground and the games periods were extraordinare.

A school picnic could become memorable not because of where the bus went, but because of who happened to sit two seats away. This was romance without a script. There was no grand setting. The setting was simply school. And that was enough.

The extraordinary importance of an ordinary piece of paper.  

Today, communication is abundant. Perhaps too abundant.

Words are sent before they are thought through. Conversations begin and end within seconds. Messages can be edited, deleted, ignored or replaced.

In the 90s, a handwritten note was an event.

A small piece of paper could pass through several hands before reaching its intended destination. It might contain nothing more than a greeting, a question or a few awkward sentences.

Yet the paper itself carried significance.

• It had handwriting.
• It had hesitation.
• It had fear, of getting caught.
• It had emotions of Love and excitement.
• It had crossed-out words.
• It had the unmistakable evidence that someone had sat down and thought about what to say.

There was no autocorrect to rescue a badly constructed sentence. There was no delete button to erase embarrassment.

Once written, the feeling existed on paper. Perhaps that is why old letters have such emotional power. They don't merely preserve what was said.

They preserve how courageously it was said.

Friends knew before the lovers did

School romance was rarely a two-person affair. There was always an ecosystem around it. Friends observed everything.

They knew who liked whom. They noticed the changed behaviour, the unnecessary trips down a particular corridor, the sudden interest in a particular subject, the suspiciously generous sharing of lunch.

They were messengers, interpreters and sometimes conspirators.

A friend could transform a completely insignificant moment into a major romantic development.

“She looked at you. He smiled at you.” , “They asked about you.”

For teenagers, these were not casual observations.

They were breaking news.

And perhaps this is another thing that made the 90s special: love had a community around it.

Today, romance can be intensely private because technology allows two people to communicate without anyone knowing.

Back then, the entire chain of communication often depended on friends. Privacy was difficult. But somehow, that made the experience warmer.

The landline telephone and the courage it demanded

The mobile phone changed romance forever. But before it arrived, there was the landline.

Calling someone at home was not merely making a call. It was taking a calculated risk.

Someone else could answer.

• A parent could ask who was calling.
• A sibling could become suspicious.
• And the person making the call had to somehow sound completely normal while their heart was doing anything but normal.

There was no private digital space in which two people could disappear together. Every conversation required courage. And because conversations were not unlimited, they mattered.

• A ten-minute call could occupy the mind for an entire evening.
• A familiar voice could become a memory.

And the absence of communication could itself become part of the romance. Today, silence is often interpreted as neglect. Back then, silence was simply...silence.

There was room to wonder.

The romance of not knowing

This may be the greatest difference between then and now. The 90s did not provide answers immediately.

A person could not know whether a message had been read. There was no online status. No location sharing. No social media activity to analyse. No photograph from three minutes ago.

If someone didn't appear at school, there was no way to know where they were.

One simply waited. And waiting has an interesting effect on the human imagination.

• It fills gaps.
• It creates possibilities.
• It turns ordinary moments into stories.

Perhaps modern technology has made communication easier but imagination poorer.

The 90s left enough unanswered questions for young hearts to create their own answers. And maybe that is why those memories feel larger than they actually were.

It was never really about the gift

The economics of school romance were wonderfully modest.

• A chocolate.
• A pen.
• A greeting card.
• A handwritten note.
• A shared lunch.
• A small photograph.

There was no expectation of expensive gestures. A teenager did not need a credit card to express affection. What mattered was not the price of the object but the thought behind it.

• A chocolate could carry the emotional weight of a diamond.
• A borrowed notebook could become precious.
• A seat saved in class could communicate something that words could not.

Romance existed in gestures because there was very little else available. And perhaps that limitation made gestures meaningful.

Then school ended

Every school romance eventually encountered the same unavoidable reality: school does not last forever.

The final year arrived. The last examinations were written. Uniforms were worn for the final time.

Autograph books (aka Scrapbooks) travelled from hand to hand.

Promises were made with the absolute confidence of people who had not yet learned how unpredictable adulthood could be.

• “Stay in touch.”
• “Don't forget me.”
• “Friends forever.”

At that age, forever seemed like a perfectly manageable promise.

Then life happened.

• College.
• Jobs.
• Cities.
• Marriage.
• Responsibilities.
• New friendships.
• New relationships.

People who once occupied entire afternoons gradually became names in old notebooks. Some stories continued.

Many didn't. Most were never really stories to begin with.

They were simply beautiful beginnings that never discovered an ending.

Why do we still remember?

Perhaps because school love was never burdened by the expectations that come later in life.It didn't have to survive financial pressures, careers, family responsibilities or the complicated negotiations of adulthood. It existed in a protected little world.

A world of uniforms, examinations, lunchboxes, school buses and annual functions.

The stakes were small. The feelings were enormous. And that combination is unforgettable. Years later, a song from an old cassette can bring it all back.

Not the entire story. Just a feeling.

• A classroom.
• A face.
• A particular afternoon.
• A name.
• A moment that lasted perhaps five seconds but somehow survived thirty years.

Memory is strange that way. It doesn't preserve everything. It preserves what mattered.

Perhaps we didn't know how lucky we were

The 90s generation grew up just before the world became permanently connected. There was a beautiful inconvenience to life. People could disappear for an afternoon. Friends could arrive at the house without calling first.

• Photographs had to be developed.
• Music had to be recorded.
• Information had to be searched for.

And love had to be discovered slowly.

There was no technology to manufacture intimacy. People had to create it themselves.

• Through conversations.
• Through presence.
• Through patience.
• Through awkwardness.
• Through waiting.

And perhaps, most importantly, through being there.

The last love letter from the school years

Maybe the real beauty of school romance was never whether the two people ended up together.

That is the question adulthood tends to ask.

• Did they marry?
• Did they stay together?
• What happened to them?

But perhaps those are the wrong questions.

The more interesting question is:

What did that love teach them?

• It taught them anticipation.
• It taught them nervousness.
• It taught them the courage to express something without knowing the answer.
• It taught them how powerful a glance could be.
• It taught them how deeply an ordinary person could suddenly matter.
• And it taught them something that adulthood often makes us forget:

Love does not become beautiful because it lasts forever.

Sometimes it is beautiful because, for a brief period, it made an ordinary life extraordinary.

Perhaps that is why the love of the 90s still has a certain glow around it.

• It was not perfect.
• It was often awkward.
• It was sometimes one-sided.
• It was frequently unspoken.

And many of those stories disappeared with the final school bell. But they left something behind.

A memory of a time when a smile could change an entire day. When a handwritten note could make a heart race. When waiting outside a classroom could feel like an appointment with destiny. When a five-minute telephone conversation could be replayed all night. When a school uniform, a wooden desk and a familiar face were enough to create an entire universe.

The world has become remarkably good at connecting people. Yet somewhere along the way, perhaps we lost the beauty of longing.

• The beauty of anticipation.
• The beauty of not knowing.
• The beauty of having very little...and feeling that it was everything.

That was school love in the 90s.

• It didn't have hashtags.
• It didn't have blue ticks.
• It didn't have algorithms.
• It didn't need them.

It had time.

And in matters of the heart, perhaps time was the most romantic luxury of all.

Love on the Other Side

We met after so long. You were dressed in your favourite colour, and for a moment, I forgot every sentence I had prepared to say. You were hypnotic, not only because of the way that colour rested so perfectly on you, but because of the happiness you carried while wearing it. 

There was a quiet confidence in your smile, a softness in your eyes, and something almost magical in the way you looked at me. Your beauty was not just in your face or in the dress you chose. It was in the little things: the way you fixed your hair without noticing, the way you laughed before finishing a sentence, the way your eyes searched for mine in a crowded place.

After so many days of missing you through a screen, seeing you in front of me felt unreal. I had known your smile through photos, your voice through calls, and your thoughts through messages. But standing beside you again was different. No notification, no photograph, no words on a screen could ever hold the warmth of that moment.

We meet only once in a months.

Sometimes it is for a few hours. Sometimes it is only long enough to hold hands, share a meal, look into each other’s eyes, and then say goodbye again. After that, life returns to its usual noise, the crowded streets, work, family, responsibilities, and the quiet room at the end of the day.

But then the phone lights up. And suddenly, the distance does not feel quite so wide.

There is something beautiful about loving someone through words. A small message can carry a whole heart inside it. A simple “Have you eaten?” can mean, “I worry about you.” A random photo from their day can mean, “I thought of you when I saw this.” A late-night “I miss you” can make the darkest room feel a little warmer.

People often think love needs grand gestures, flowers at the door, surprise dates, long drives, and photographs filled with perfect smiles. Those things are beautiful, of course. But there is another kind of love: the love that lives quietly in a chat window.

It lives in the good-morning texts sent before the day begins. It lives in the “reached home?” message after a tiring journey. It lives in the little updates that may seem ordinary to everyone else “Chai Piyega,” “Barish Dekh...” “Samosey Khayega....” To the world, they are just words. To two people in love, they are proof: I am here. I remember you. I want you to be part of my day.

And those chats bring out every emotion we try to hide.

We smile at the screen without even realizing it. A message from them can change the mood of an entire day. We may be sitting with friends, pretending to listen, but one notification makes our eyes fall to the phone and our face soften. We read their message once, then again, just to feel it one more time.

Sometimes we laugh quietly at an inside joke that nobody else would understand. Sometimes we blush at a compliment, even though no one is around to see it. Sometimes we hold the phone close to our chest after reading something sweet, as if their words can somehow stay there.

But love is not only soft smiles and beautiful messages. It also brings the low moments.

There are times when the reply comes late, and the mind begins to create a hundred worries. There are times when a short answer feels colder than it was meant to be. A simple “okay” can hurt when we were hoping for more. We type long paragraphs, then erase them because we do not know how to explain the storm inside us. We get angry. We become silent. We say, “Nothing is wrong,” when everything is.

That is because love makes us vulnerable.

When someone matters deeply, their words matter deeply too. Their absence is noticed. Their silence is felt. Their smallest change in tone can make our heart restless. We may try to act strong, but love does not always let us hide behind strength.

Still, even in anger, there is love.

There is love in the message that comes after a fight: “Aaj kay baad shakal maat dikhana” There is love in the hesitation before saying sorry. There is love in choosing to understand each other when it would be easier to walk away. There is love in staying online a little longer because neither person wants to be the one to end the conversation.

No one else can bring out those expressions.

If somebody looks at you while you are texting your lover, they will know. They may not know the name on your screen, but they will recognize the feeling. They will see your smile appearing out of nowhere. They will see you frown at a message and then quickly type a reply. They will notice the way your eyes become softer, the way your mood changes, the way a small glowing screen seems to hold your entire attention.

Because no friend, no stranger, no ordinary conversation can create that same expression.

Only love can.

Only that one person can make you smile at nothing, feel angry over a missed reply, reread a message before sleeping, and wake up hoping their name will be the first thing you see. Only they can turn a few typed words into a heartbeat.

Distance may keep two people apart physically, but it cannot always keep their hearts apart. Sometimes love travels through tiny bubbles on a screen. Sometimes it arrives in voice notes, photographs, teasing messages, apologies, and promises to meet soon. Sometimes it survives because, even from far away, two people continue choosing each other every day.

So yes, we may meet only once in a few days.

But in between those meetings, we sit together in a different way.

Through words. Through laughter. Through arguments. Through late-night confessions. Through the smile that appears when their name flashes on the screen.

Love is not always beside us.

Sometimes, it is on the other side of the phone, still close enough to make our hearts feel full.

Does God Exists - A Chatgpt Logic

 Does God Exist?? 

Yes. If we approach it purely through logic, without assuming any religion is true or false, the most defensible answer is:

We cannot logically prove that God exists, but we also cannot logically prove that God does not exist. The question is ultimately about which explanation of reality has the stronger overall explanatory power.

Here is how I would reason about it.

1. Something exists rather than nothing

This is the deepest starting point.

There is a universe. There is matter, energy, space, time, and consciousness.

So we can ask:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

There are broadly three possibilities:

1. The universe came from nothing.
2. The universe is ultimately self-explanatory/necessary.
3. Something beyond the universe explains why it exists.

The third possibility is compatible with the concept of God.

But there is an immediate logical problem:

If everything needs a cause, then what caused God?

The classical answer is that God is not a contingent thing requiring a cause; God is proposed as a necessary being.

That's logically coherent—but it is an additional philosophical premise, not an experimentally established fact.

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2. The universe appears remarkably structured

Physics gives us laws that are extraordinarily precise.

The constants governing gravity, electromagnetism, quantum physics, etc., fall within ranges that permit complex matter, stars, chemistry and eventually life.

This produces the fine-tuning argument:

Why does the universe have conditions capable of producing conscious observers?

Possible explanations include:

• coincidence,
• physical necessity,
• multiverse,
• some unknown deeper physics,
• intelligent design.

God is therefore a possible explanation, but not the only one.

And importantly, "we don't know" is not logically equivalent to "therefore God."

---

3. Consciousness is particularly interesting

This is, to me, one of the strongest philosophical questions.

Your brain is physical.

But you don't experience yourself merely as electrical and chemical activity.

There is a subjective experience:

"I am aware that I exist."

Science can correlate consciousness with brain activity extremely well. But the deeper philosophical question remains:

Why should physical processes produce subjective experience at all?

We don't currently have a universally accepted solution to this.

That leaves possibilities such as:

• consciousness emerges from sufficiently complex matter,
• consciousness is a fundamental property of reality,
• reality has some deeper informational structure,
• or consciousness ultimately has a non-material foundation.

Again, this doesn't prove God.

But it makes the nature of reality much more mysterious than "matter simply exists."

---

4. But there is a powerful argument against a traditional God

The strongest challenge is probably the problem of evil and suffering.

If God is:

• omnipotent,
• omniscient,
• and perfectly good,

then why does enormous apparently unnecessary suffering exist?

Cancer, earthquakes, children dying, wars, animal suffering, etc.

There are philosophical responses—free will, soul-making, limitations of human understanding, greater-good arguments—but none is universally compelling.

This is a serious logical challenge to certain conceptions of God.

---

5. What does science tell us?

Science cannot currently establish:

"God exists."

But it also cannot establish:

"God does not exist."

That's because God, if conceived as transcendent, isn't necessarily an entity inside the physical universe that can be detected with an instrument.

It's similar to asking physics to determine whether a mathematical proposition has metaphysical meaning.

The question crosses from empirical science into metaphysics.

---

My logical conclusion

If you force me to give a binary answer:

I would not conclude "God definitely exists."

But I also would not conclude "God definitely doesn't exist."

The intellectually strongest position is:

There is insufficient evidence to establish the existence of a personal God with certainty, but the existence of a fundamental intelligence, necessary reality, or transcendent ground of existence remains philosophically plausible.

And there is one particularly interesting point.

The question may actually be deeper than:

"Does God exist?"

It may be:

"Why does reality exist, and why does reality have the particular properties that allow consciousness to emerge?"

We currently don't have a final answer to either question.

And that's where the debate becomes genuinely fascinating—because atheism, theism, deism, pantheism and simulation/physicalist hypotheses all have unresolved philosophical problems.

The Last Train to Childhood

Somewhere between learning how to calculate interest rates and learning how to file our taxes, a quiet, almost imperceptible trade took place.

We traded total immersion for efficiency. We traded radical curiosity for self-preservation. We stopped asking "Why?" because we became too embarrassed to admit we didn't know the answer, and we stopped playing because everything we do now has to have a point, a product, or a paycheck.

We call this process growing up. And while maturity undeniably brings independence, agency, and wisdom, it often demands an absurdly high cover charge: our capacity for unadulterated wonder.

The Myth of Departure

We tend to view childhood as a distinct location on a map, a sunny, distant province we boarded a train away from long ago, never to return. We look back at it through a window blurred by time, treating it with a soft, slightly condescending nostalgia. “Those were simple times,” we say over coffee, as if simplicity was a structural luxury of youth rather than a deliberate choice of perspective.

But childhood wasn't superior because we had fewer bills, smaller responsibilities, or more free time. It was superior because of how we occupied our minds while living it:

• Living in the Present Tense: A cardboard box wasn't a future recycling chore or an eyesore in the living room; it was a functioning space station, right now, in this exact minute.
  
  
• Unfiltered Emotional Expression: When we were sad, we cried openly. When we were thrilled, we jumped until our knees hurt. We didn't edit our feelings to match the ambient social energy of the room.
  
  
• Radical Openness to Connection: Friendship required no shared political alignment, career status, or synchronised calendar invites. It required only two people standing in the same sandbox, mutually agreeing to build something out of dirt.

When we board the train of adulthood, we don't actually lose those human capacities, we simply stop using them. We pack them away into the overhead bin, convinced that heavy seriousness is the only valid currency of a mature life.

The Productivity Trap and the Death of Play

As adults, our relationship with time becomes aggressively transactional. Every hour must be accounted for, optimized, or rendered productive. Even our leisure time has fallen victim to this corporate creep. We don't just run, we track our pace on apps and post the metrics. We don't just cook; we photograph the meal to curate a digital persona. We don't just collect a hobby; we ask ourselves if it can become a "side hustle."

In doing so, we have murdered the concept of pure play—doing an activity solely for the unscripted joy of doing it, completely detached from the final outcome or our skill level at it.

Children understand something that modern self-help culture constantly forgets: Joy is found in the doing, not the proving. A child painting a terrible, lopsided sun isn't stressing over whether it belongs in a gallery or if they are "a real artist." They are simply mesmerized by the feeling of bright yellow paint spreading across paper.

The Practice of Unlearning

The Last Train to Childhood is not an invitation to abandon your mortgage, ignore your inbox, or shirk your genuine adult responsibilities. It is not an argument for childishness, it is an argument for childlikeness.

It is an invitation to unlearn the quiet cynicism that adulthood hands us alongside our first set of house keys. It is a space designed to remind you of a few fundamental truths:

1. Wonder does not expire. You do not need a child or a younger sibling in your life as an official excuse to feel awe at a thunderstorm or build something with your hands.
   
   
2. Amateurism is a virtue. You do not need to be good at drawing, writing, dancing, or baking to earn the right to enjoy them thoroughly.
   
   
3. Curiosity is stronger than judgment. Choosing to be fascinated by the world instead of critical of it is the fastest way to cure modern exhaustion.
   
   

Boarding the Train

The last train hasn't left the station. The tracks don't run on a rigid schedule; they run on
intention.

Reclaiming your childhood state of mind isn't about turning back the clock, it’s about deciding, today, to look at the world with open eyes again. It means choosing fascination over indifference, play over optimization, and genuine presence over constant speed.

This blog is a quiet station stop along your busy life. Pull up a seat, take a breath, look out the window, and let’s remember together who we were before the world told us who we had to be.

To help craft the next editorial piece, what is one small thing you used to do as a child that you miss doing purely for the fun of it?