graduateyvs: The College Years
If you came up to me in the summer of 2018 and said, “You’re gonna be as clueless at the end of your college life as you are at the moment,” I’d have believed you- no questions asked.
My college life ended exactly 9 days ago, and while I’m more than happy to have escaped the faux-virtual-reality nightmare that is online education, the bigger picture doesn’t seem to be as horrendous. It was three long years after all, the last six months of which were straight out of the climax of a coming-of-age flick. Or so I think.
2018 was a good year.
I hated it back then since the wounds of entrance examinations were still fresh. I was a ‘specialist in failure’ and society™ left no stone unturned to rub it into my face- be it via merit lists or three-digit cut-offs in premier institutions all across the country. Most of my peers were ‘getting into places’- some more prestigious than others- and were ‘set for life’. I, on the other hand, was warming the cushions at home and contemplating, among other things, taking a gap year. I did not take one eventually, and my dreams of becoming a doctor were euthanised then and there. It was a gut-wrenching experience, particularly because of the magnificent castles I had constructed in my head about my future self. But castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually.
So what do you do when you don’t get something you desperately desire from the deepest, darkest and dingiest dungeons of your heart?
You cope.
I didn’t have the numbers to get into the University Of Delhi. 90.0 % aren’t DU numbers. But to quote ThePrint, I had a ‘secret weapon’. Move over nuclear warheads, creative minds are the new weapons of mass destruction. I’m looking at you, Zack Snyder.
Anyway, I got into the Physics programme at Venky via the ECA quota. That was an alien concept to most of my classmates. Why would a babbling bard like me take up an academically rigorous course like Physics? I still don't have an answer but back then I believed I was really good at it. Hahaha.
But I evolved, and the 2018 predicaments, where I played protagonist, catalysed this change. Growth was two-fold: physical and mental. Physically I went from being a naive boy to a full-blown lizard. Mentally my brain was rewired.
There’s a lot of chatter about DU spaces being echo chambers but it couldn’t be farther from the truth. Call it a democratised student pool or an academic jungle, one meets all kinds of people here. I’ve been raised in defence cantonments- traditionally sheltered spaces with very little connection to the civil world.
So one could say that this was my first waltz with the real world, and boy it was a ride. Being the perpetual query generating machine I am, there were no aspects on which I didn’t quiz people. It was one way of making up for all the ‘grown-up’ experiences I’d been a stranger to. A few thousand cultural shocks later I’d gotten a hang of how the world worked. Or a part of it, I don’t really know anymore.
Cut to my final semester: I am the grumpy senior I didn’t want to be. The only thing that’s kept me busy for the past year is a quiz society- the only entity I’ve fallen in love with during college (well maybe not just the only entity). Almost every night I got on a call with my juniors on Discord, sharing my pearls of wisdom as an almost obsolete dinosaur while a football match ran in the background to engage our visual cortex. I talked about stuff™ and society™ and they listened, surprisingly enough. I think I’ve told the same stories a hundred times but they’re too polite to point it out. Am I a dad already?
I have done everything I have wanted to in the last six months. And I’ve had a hell of a lot of fun doing all this. I had a lot of time since the academic business had evolved into free real estate. I’ve written comedy sketches, I’ve turned singer-songwriter, and even composed a complete pop number (Ankit Rathi if you’re reading this please mix the goddamned vocals man). I’ve written a novella and half a novel. Two ‘half-a-novels’ actually. Yes, I have considered the possibility of fusing them together and publishing them as a single avant-garde work of art.
I’ve taken also two rounds of the useless Open Book Examinations, and unsurprisingly enough, aced them. This is ironic because with each passing semester I’ve felt more and more disconnected from my course. It’s a worrying trend that has bogged down even the most academically inclined people I’ve known. I’m not even going to talk about the batch that started college online.
The one good thing I take away with me is the ability to talk to people. I can make small talk with the wall. Heck, I have been doing that, as my quest to find the method in monotony meanders on. What’s life going to be like in a year, or say even two years? Honestly, I’m too busy rolling up my rock to the top of the hill every day to think about it.
