Life

Post Number 16 : Letter to a Younger Self

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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.

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Post Number 15: Of Intent And Indulgence

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

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.

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Post Number 13 : Comprehending Cynicism

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Recently, I was recommended a movie, ‘The Intern’ by my friends. Truth be told, the recommendation was given a long time ago, but I got around to watching it quite late. The Intern, if you haven’t seen, (SPOILER ALERT) is a heart-warming and easy going story centred around a widower retiree (played by Robert DeNiro) who joins a ‘Senior Citizens’ Internship’ at an up and coming fashion start-up run by Anne Hathaway. The movie focuses on the friendship that these unlikely characters end up forming. Starting skeptically, DeNiro eventually finds a place for himself within the organization by assisting Anne in various ways. Their bond strengthens and Anne ends up finding a confidant in DeNiro. With no major ups and downs and a simple narrative arc, the movie ends, leaving a smile on your face. What’s the trouble then?

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Post Number 12 : The Price of Immortality

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

In 1954, Jonas Salk developed a vaccine to treat the ever increasing menace of Poliomyelitis. In 1955 the first human cells were successfully cloned. Within years, the discovery of the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) was linked to the occurrence of cervical cancer in women. On surface, these remarkable medical accomplishments seem totally unrelated. But as you may have guessed, there is indeed a correlation between them, and it is one that rarely gets the credit it deserves. All these accomplishments were a consequence of medical testing done on the tumour cells of an African American woman, Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were the first ‘immortal’ line of cells.

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Post Number 11 : Talent and Person- One or separate?

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

Have you seen The Carmichael Show? You should. For a comedy series in today’s age, it is surprisingly insightful and entertaining.

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I am particularly impressed by the second episode of Season 2 in the series. The protagonist of the show, Jerrod gets tickets to a live show by Bill Cosby for his family on his parents’ anniversary following which there’s intense and comedic discussion over whether they should attend the show or not, given the recent news of Cosby’s scandals.

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Post Number 10 : We are all running. (But do we know why?)

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

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?’

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Post Number 8: Life and Doubts

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

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 5:The night before the exam

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

The clock’s tick-tock grates on my nerves.
Everything is silent and the only sound that can be heard is occasional howling by the bored neighbourhood dog who has nothing better to do.
Immensely grateful, I thank the lords for not forcing my ears to be an unwilling guest at someone’s loud wedding.

I am flipping through the pages in front of me but the words have long since stopped making any sense.
Still I march forward with the studying.
The exam’s tomorrow and there is still so much to do.
The cups of coffee are losing their effect and I am reminded I should take a break and go to the kitchen for some more.
Not that it’ll help much.

The legs of the chair screech as I push back the chair.
On the way to the kitchen, all the different formulae, theorems, definitions swim through my head.
I am so drowsy I could just fall down and not feel a thing.

But there’s still do much to do.
The irony of the promise I made during the last exams isn’t lost on me.
Then too, a solemn promise had been made to study beforehand and not leave everything until the last minute.

Oh well.
Lets get on with making the coffee.
As I add some instant-coffee powder in the hot milk, I go through the syllabus again.
Hmm, there aren’t too many topics left.
I’ll manage to complete them in the morning.

Pouring the coffee powder on the spoon back into its jar, I switch off the kitchen’s light and zombie my way to my bed.
Barely removing my slippers, I plop down flat on my bed and pull the covers up.
Silently praying that the exam goes well, I close my eyes, knowing it’ll be just as terrible as ever.

Post Number 4: Unresolved Resolves

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

Post Number 4: Unresolved Resolves

At midnight, on 31st December, as the minute hand went past 12, indicating the onset of the year of the Monkey, my Facebook wall was inundated with an annoying amount of “New Year, New Me”  posts and people behaving as if the increment from 2015 to 2016 was nothing short of the New World Order with Inspirational quotes to an extent that would give even Oprah Winfrey a complex. And amidst all this chaos of creating an occasion out of something that should seem ordinary, the passing of time, the common theme in almost every declaration of attention seeking (a.k.a  XYZ is celebrating the new year with his/her profile friends, their pets, the entire city, Superman, Batman, E.T., the creatures from Avatar and 50 others) all of them mentioned one particular thing, Resolutions!

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AH! Resolutions. A wonderful yearly reminder to oneself of one’s uselessness and lack of ambition and dedication. How among everything else, we fail at pursuing the most mundane of things, that too decided by us only! Now, who doesn’t like that? To be nudged not-so gently periodically and be told “You know that thing you wanted to do and should have done WAY ago, yeah you should ‘try’ doing that again.”

I got off my laptop without posting ANY DAMN New Year nonsense (where’s my medal for courage in face of social expectations?) and scavenged through my unkempt bookshelf to find what I wanted to, my dust laden, slightly cobwebby (I should really clean more….maybe I could make that a resolution?….LOL who am I kidding?) ‘Resolution Diary’ . And as theatrically as I could manage, I blew off the dust and opened it with a dreamy nostalgic look on my face. Now it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I hadn’t managed to accomplish most of my resolutions- most of which involved physical exertion(SHOCKING!!). But there was a saving grace- I had managed to fulfill one task, that involved reading around 20+ books in the year. I was ecstatic. 2015 hadn’t been THAT useless after all. I did ultimately pull off one resolution, although the rest peered back at me like sad, neglected children that had been overlooked for their more loved sibling. Why couldn’t I manage to do any other task? If I had managed one, theoretically I could have managed the others as well? *emphasis on theoretically* Why wasn’t I as motivated for the rest of the resolutions ? Why didn’t I end up in better physical shape by the end of the year? Why hadn’t a reunion for F.R.I.E.N.D.S released exactly 10 years after the last episode? Why hadn’t ‘Fetch’ become a genuine English word? QUESTIONS! QUESTIONS!

New-Year-Resolution

As much as I wanted to analyze the psychology behind my actions and inaction, I had other urgently important stuff to do such as judging people by their social media antics and commenting witty one liners on their posts to hoard likes ,so I found myself a new pen and neatly scribbled 2016 RESOLUTIONS in fancy cursive writing and very cleverly extended arrows from the 2015 page to the 2016 page ( Genius I know!) . With a grin on my face, I kept the diary back on the bookshelf, slighlty hidden because I didn’t want anyone else to see it and have a good  chuckle on my account.

I was glad to have taken the initiative to resolve the unresolved resolutions. And so I have decided and I’ll let you all know, that in 2016, I will learn a new language, lose weight, start exercising, eat better yada yada ………….. starting next Monday!

regina