1) The chicks whom you used to LUST after in college, are all married. And they have kids.

2) You can relate more to Pink Floyd's Time than Metallica's Enter Sandman.

3) You've spent 5 years in a job, with random intermittent bouts of total bitter disillusionment about your chosen field of work, interspersed with random intermittent bouts of total complacent bliss. And you don't know which cycle is about to hit you next.

4) You really don't know whether the guys you used to hang out with in college are 'onsite' or 'offshore'. Because they stop sending you pix after their first couple of trips.

5) Owning a car doesn't seem like a big deal. Really. Each one of your friends now owns one.

6) Kids in your building call you 'uncle' instead of 'bhaiyya'. For those blessed with big foreheads and an overbearing sense of precocious maturity, rookie cabbies and rick drivers do so too. Sometimes.

7) You pass by your former 10/12th 'coaching class' where you tried to cram a year's worth of 'learning' into 2 months, and look at the newest batch of students standing outside. Geeky, unsure, fresh out of school, complete with gawky stances and horrendous clothes. And positively feeling that you were different from them at that stage in your life. You think you were, but chances are that you really weren't.

8) Blowing up 600 bucks on a single dinner sitting (with suitable tissue restorers) doesn't seem THAT big a deal. Till it suddenly dawns on you that it could have lasted you a week back in college.

9) You are now financially capable of footing enormous phone bills every month, but then it dawns on you that there is no one really whom you can call up and yap about incredibly insignificant minutiae in town anymore for hours together. Either because they have other priorities in life, or because they aren't in town.

10) You meet up with school friends, and while generally reminiscing about the good times, somebody says "Do you realize that we've known each other for over 15 years?". And you stop, stare and say "Yes. 15 years." There's this moment of warm, thoughtful silence, and then you pick up from where you left off.

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11) When you start reminiscing about how Sachin Tendulkar demoralized the Australian bowling in Sharjah, and you were hooked to the TV to savor his strokework. "He was young then" you answer when someone asks why Sachin is no longer that batsman. Or for that matter, your only glowing memory of Venkatesh Prasad is the quarter-final between India and Pakistan in Bangalore, and Aamir Sohail.

12) When friends from really long time ago ping you on chat and say "Hey Buddy, Howz it going" and you reply "Nothing much", and you both quickly run out words to keep up the conversation.

13) You buy tickets for parties and clubs where there are more upper 20s or lower 30s crowd. Suddenly the college hangout clubs seem like places where there's too much noise, uncouth young kids, and perpetually drunk people. You look at such crowds with disapproval and think you too partied like hell, but were never like them. Hence you justify your choice of a more sober party.

14) The first thing you want to do when you go back to your hometown is to eat the dabeli from a stall outside your school. You feel happy that the price of dabeli has increased just 2 Rs even after all these years. And the taste, its unchanged. You look at your school from the dabeli-chat center and all the uniformed kids in there and wonder who are they. You so want to go to the school and say hello, even to the meanest teacher that ever taught you, but you are in a hurry to go somewhere else. You promise to self that you'll be back again to go to school and eat dabelis too, but you never do.

15) You smirk at someone who says he wants to open up his or her business and gives you a rundown on how they'd do it. You realize you thought you too could take on the world too at some point. There's a cynic in you now who looks at everything in doubt.

16) When you and your friends start discussing who's going to have the first baby in your group. Some years ago, mentioning the word "relationship" would have been a crime in itself.

17) You go to your friend's place and glance at his bookshelf. All it contains are books on subjects like "investments", "strocks", "real estate", "tax planning" and the likes. You wonder wherever did those Tintins and Calvins go.

18) You hate driving long distances. If it can be reached by a plane or a bus, you will pay for the tickets and feel happy. Only a few years ago, you would have driven and saved the money so you could have blown it on something else.

19) You feel happy on discovering your old friends on facebook. All of you add each other in each other's friends list. You even go as far as to say "His" and "Hellos", and then each one of you disappears into your own world.

20) There are hardly any messages in the college e-group you were a member of once you had graduated. It would be filled with news of people joining and leaving companies. Some would announce their marriages, while others their alliances. Mobile phone number changes would be promptly notified in the group lest somebody else forget them. Some others would mail about the college and how things improved significantly once you left. And then it starts winding down. You have no idea after a while who's where in which place. You have no idea who's married or is getting married. And then you stop caring anymore. Occasionally somebody sends what seems like an update, but you are too busy to read it and forget about it.

21) When you look through your friend's status in Orkut and they've gone from being "single" to "married", some uploading even their babies pictures in their albums. They used to be your classmates in schools and colleges once.

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