Fifty Years Later

There are reunions, and then there are IAS reunions. The former involve nostalgia. The latter too involve nostalgia; but also protocol, subtle comparison, and the quiet belief—held with touching sincerity by almost everyone present—that time has treated them with exceptional generosity, and that they have aged distinctly better than most others in the batch. The changes in others strike us immediately. The changes in ourselves rarely do.
Some of us could  not attend the golden jubilee reunion. Yet for two days, thanks to the relentless efficiency of the batch WhatsApp group, the absentees may actually have seen more of it than those physically present.
Photographs arrived in battalions. Group photographs. Dinner photographs. Walking photographs. Smiling photographs. Photographs of people photographing one another. The commentary below them was equally energetic: delight, nostalgia, rediscovered affection, and the occasional attempt to identify a batchmate whose appearance had undergone what could best be described as constitutional amendment.
The first striking revelation was sartorial. Fifty years ago, most of us looked like earnest research scholars accidentally recruited into government service. The men wore convention and expressions of administrative destiny. The women, though far more graceful, carried the austere simplicity of an India that still distrusted flamboyance.
Now, astonishingly, everyone looks better.
The gentlemen have discovered jackets, scarves, bright ties, colour coordination, and something called casual sophistication. The ladies have achieved that rare combination of dignity and elegance which makes age appear less a decline than a successful editing process. Retirement, clearly, has succeeded where government service failed: it has improved dress sense.
But beneath the elegant exterior, the familiar personalities survive untouched.
The talkative remain as much in love with their own voices as they were fifty years ago. They are still conducting seminars rather than conversations. The quiet ones continue their lifelong resistance to unnecessary speech and now enjoy the added reputation of wisdom. The romantics still carry a faint air of probationary optimism. The bitter continue to diagnose the decline of institutions with undiminished energy, proving that resentment ages remarkably well.
Some habits, evidently, qualify as constitutional features.
Health found mention too, though with admirable restraint for a gathering comfortably past seventy. A few references to knees, sugar levels, sleep disorders, and cardiologists surfaced from time to time, like cautious footnotes to ageing. But mercifully, the reunion never degenerated into a full-scale medical symposium.
But perhaps the greatest shock was reserved not for the batchmates, but for the Academy itself. The Mussoorie we entered in 1976 survives now more in memory than in stone. Many of the old hostels, lecture halls, pathways, and modest buildings that shaped our probationary anxieties have disappeared, replaced by newer, larger, and more polished structures. Progress has undoubtedly improved the Academy. Yet one suspects that many officers quietly wandered about searching not for buildings, but for vanished time.
Some must have stood at spots where old hostels once existed, trying to superimpose memory upon altered landscape. Others perhaps revisited favourite haunts outside the campus—the tea shops, winding roads, viewpoints, cafés, and walks where friendships were forged, romances occasionally imagined, and the future still appeared manageable. Places change. Memory stubbornly refuses to cooperate.
And yet, behind the humour and nostalgia, there was tenderness too.
Some names appeared only in remembrance. Some faces were absent from the photographs but vividly present in recollection. At our age, reunions are no longer merely social gatherings. They are also quiet negotiations with time.
What does one finally carry away from such occasions?
Not merely photographs. Not merely nostalgia.
One carries home the warmth of rediscovered companionship—the comforting recognition that beneath careers, rivalries, achievements, disappointments, and bureaucratic hierarchies, there survives a fellowship born in youth and unexpectedly renewed in age. For a brief moment, one belongs again to a shared beginning.
Perhaps that is why such reunions matter.
They remind us that while the body surrenders steadily to age, personality remains magnificently stubborn. Fifty years may silver the hair, soften ambition, and weaken knees, but they do very little to alter the essential human being beneath.
The vain remain vain. The funny remain funny. The pompous remain pompous. The generous remain generous.
And the IAS, even in retirement, remains what it always was: a gathering of highly accomplished people, each secretly convinced that he or she was slightly brighter than the rest of the batch.

(Uday Kumar Varma is an IAS officer. Retired as Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting)