I am all set to keep on jotting down my life so that ten years from today i would love to recollect this post. When we were young we all did this with a lot of our activities. Wherever we used to go we left some kind of marks only to see whether they survive the test of time. I still recollect our treasure hunt games when we found something immensely valuable to us ( like the 1980’s black telephone collected from the dump yard of the Telephone Exchange in my Township ) and we dug a hole in one of our playgrounds and buried it for our next generation to find it. How much i miss those days where i was really myself, ever unpretentious and ever filled with lots of energy. Things have indeed changed with time.

Multitude of Contrasts and Similarity

1998: Every kid’s most important year. on my 16th year i appeared for the first public exam in my life and was quite satisfied with my performance which was indeed nothing when its compared to other meritorious students of my school. I never knew a world existed beyond my small town. Suddenly everyone started getting into tuitions for some unforeseen subjects which they can only choose after they get their 10th board results. These whole melodrama which is perfectly orchestrated by the teachers, parents and the students sounds so unreal with present set of thoughts. I was always trying to be different from the rest and in that way i never really liked this tuition culture which really took the very essence out of the school system. Teachers never taught in school because they repeated the same stuff in their tuition classes and students on the other hand hardly attended school because they were too busy running around from one tuition to another. Do we really need to go through so much trouble to get that elite engineering or medical seat? With no blame towards my folks, they never really encouraged us to think beyond the box, never really guided us to know the various avenues of life which can be led with the right bent of mind. They always wanted the best for all three of us but how i wish that they were much more liberal in terms of life. I always knew that my brother would have been a great sportsman if somebody could have showed him the way. Well i moved to the different school and took the prestigious combination of Physics/Chemistry/Mathematics/ Biology which kept both the professional lines open for me. Well this isn’t what i wanted to be at the age of 16. My world revolved all around History and Geography. The cirrus clouds still amuse me and the great great Khurana book on the Indian history was my bedtime passion. All passion ignited when i took up the Science Stream.

2000: This being a small school, I got noticed due to lack of other able students. I was the Captain of the House and used to the second topper in the batch but when i compare myself with my previous school mates i still hung myself pretty low with the self esteem thing. Also started the quiz club in the school and participated in a quiz events in the town. This school taught me how to do nothing in life and still be happy. The teachers were the most qualified with least interest to impart any kind of knowledge to the students and the parents were pretty happy that the kids were part of NCC which was not very active apart form the Wednesday morning march past. Well I again did average in my 12th board exams and now it was time for the battle of the kings. The ever potent IIT-JEE ( Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Exam ) was looming right over my head. The only information i knew about this was this is a very tough exam to crack and indeed i never cracked it. So settled for my engineering degree with an obscure college in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. A whole new world is about to get rolling for me. Never been away from home which actually turned out to be very fruitful in terms of the knowledge and wit accumulated outside the college classrooms.

2000: After four months of utter laziness i was thrown into the dungeons of a big city all alone. Thats the best gift my folks ever gave to me and that is to be independent at the age of 18 which is quite late to western standards but quite normal time for us Indians. Though i was dependent on my folks for the tuitions and monetary support i was quite free to do anything i wanted to. These new found freedom was not well utilized. Always a feeling hounds us of not being able to live up to our expectations. I took up Chemical engineering which was indeed a very interesting branch even though i didn’t have the faintest idea about what they taught in a chemical engineering degree. The selection of the Branch is usually more based on availability than interest amongst most Indian students. We all feel at times that life is so tough and we are surely surviving because of our talent and instinct for survival. Most of us never really felt what living on the edge is. For us getting a reservation in the sleeper class of an Indian Railways seems to be an achievement of sort. Initial days of college was full of fun with me being a small town boi was an immediate favorite with the seniors for my ability to remain foolish which was indeed true in the toughest of conditions provided by them. I singlehandedly provided them a lot of laughter for four months with my stupid activities which was to go against the flow.

2001: Ragging continued and my I was lucky to have a very considerate room mate in my dorm. He was exactly opposite to me. He studied a whole lot, he listened to the seniors, he is a very good guy. He used to wake up early in the morning to study in the bed under the quilt with the table lamp being bent so that it provides those much needed light rays for my buddy to read. His early morning studies were the solution of ragging all throughout the evening. We had our share of fun being ragged. It surely helped me become a man from a humble boy. Thank You Oh mighty seniors !! Completed my first year in college without much fanfare and accomplishments

2002: There was a policy in my college that students are allowed to change their specializations after the completion of the first year based on their first year marks. The so called lower branches of engineering like Chemical, Civil, Mechanical were always on the hunt for the higher echelons of engineering like Electronics, Computer without having the vague idea of what they were all about. I was in the same bandwagon who jumped to Mechanical engineering. Do i really want to be a mechanical engineer ? It doesn’t matter since anyways i never wanted to be an engineer. Classes started with full gush and we started clearing subjects instead of learning them. Our professors were never qualified enough to teach. I would still vouch for my school because i really learnt a lot from the teachers out there unlike my higher secondary school and college.

I want to leave this unfinished even today because i think i learnt in these 26 years that rushing into things never brought out the best out you. So keep reading and Happy Munching !