If you don’t know where you’re going, any road would lead you there. – Lewis Carroll
Courtesy – Martin Liebermann (c) martin-liebermann.de
Ironically, I just heard it from a girl in a movie where she devotes her everything to her ambition of becoming an Olympic long distance runner.
Dear Chaitanya circa 2014,
It’s 22 March today and you’ve just walked out of your Computer Science board examination. You know it pretty well that you aced it. Your friends share your expression of relief at having just written their last board exam. All this while, it was hyped up to be this Herculean task that only gladiators survived through, but now that you have experienced it for yourself, you realize it was more of a test of your temperament rather than your knowledge. Congratulations, this is one of the biggest Eureka moments you will have in the upcoming years. Henceforth, most of the tests you will encounter whether of an academic or of a personal nature will test more of your attitude and disposition rather than your factual ability to decompress it and deduce a solution.
For the third week running, I woke up at Wednesday at 10:30 AM, precisely 90 minutes late for college. With 2 lectures already missed (unintentionally, I may add), I forced myself to get out of bed in order to make it to the rest of them in time. After applying the relevant mathematical theorems and lemmas into the Equation of Attendance by factoring the constant of laziness and the proportionality of boredom of lectures, I decided to finally go…… back to bed.
I sit in front of my laptop screen on a fine Sunday evening, too lazy to study something with utmost concentration and too active to simply lie down and take a nap, hence, prone to one of my periodic bouts of overthinking. And with the backdrop of internship and placement season going on in the college campus, there is one overriding sentiment I am nursing currently. ‘Why isn’t the prospect of getting/not getting an internship not affecting me as much as it is affecting my peers?’
Entering the haloed gates of the top engineering colleges is a dream. For most of us, unfortunately the heady feeling of this dream coming true is short lived.
Quite a few of us decided to add Tech to the B only because our parents wished so (maybe even ordered us to do so.). Many others did it because there wasn’t anything else that they really wished to do. Engineering seemed to be the safest choice. After all, chasing our dreams may sound courageous, but courage wouldn’t pay our bills or even buy us the humble daal and roti.
And thus we start the rest of our lives, confused about what we really want. Don’t you worry child, whether or not you make new friends, this confusion may accompany you for a long time…maybe even after college.
Then comes the time for showing everyone what a big shot you are on the first day. It doesn’t even take the first lecture to get over before you’re punched in the gut with the realisation that you’re not really the next Elon Musk. The boy or girl sitting next to you seems just as smart and talented as you are. Thus begins the confusion of self-worth. This too shall be your loyal mistress for the coming years. And after you read the next paragraph, this might be the only mistress you’re going to get for a some time.
Talking of mistress and handsome lovers, we must also talk about our wish to find our soul-mate. For the more hip and happening ones, even flings seem all right. But the cursed male to female ratio successfully destroys all our romantic dreams. This itself can make anyone to become a feminist crusader for all the girls who couldn’t attend school or didn’t take science and engineering. After all, your “coochy-coo” could have been one of them. But alas! Many of us are left to be the secret Romeos or Juliets who post our heartfelt messages on confession pages, constantly wondering if there is something wrong with how we walk or talk or look. And hence our confusion about our looks and personality start.
Meanwhile, you’re also seriously contemplating your future course of life. Do you actually like your stream or should you switch over to something else? MBA sounds cool. IAS doesn’t sound so bad either or should I learn some programming languages and take up coding? For some of us, we’re unable to resolve this dilemma even in our fourth year of college. We just go where the masses go. Not all of us our made to be the shepherds. Some need to fit the roles of the clueless sheep.
Of course, life’s confusions don’t stop here. Just when you think you’ve got a hang of things, life just has to meddle and mess up everything. The only thing we can do is sit back and laugh at the comedy our lives are.
Post Number 3 : The Career Catastrophe
“Girlfriend hai tumhari?” asked the aunty sitting in front of me, shoving the samosa in her mouth, giving me a sly grin, hoping I would say something that would give her gossip fodder for her evening chat with the rest of her clique. I sidestepped this trap by giving a well-structured “NO”. “Aage career ka kya socha hai?” she sputtered, both literally and figuratively, as a pea popped out of her mouth. “I haven’t decided” I replied demurely, not willing to discuss my future with a random aunty and also because…..I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And as the aunty went into a monologue, explaining to me how an MBA will do me wonders, I activated my ‘Ignore-them-but-pretend-I’m-hearing’ mode just in time, inclusive of the periodic head nod and monotonic ‘Hmm..’
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