"Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand."

After the last 4 years, I know probably less about Polymers and more about myself. In many ways, my experience in this madhouse has been very different than a ‘normal’ one (but then, what is normal?), one full of disappointments that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies, and self-discovery and extreme expression of all my beliefs and selves that I’d recommend to the best of my friends. My evaluation of college life is that it’s a game of Sims, where you are in absolute control of your immediate actions and bear absolute responsibility for their immediate and long-term consequences. In no way, shape or form is anything that I say here is as right as the snow is white, nor is it necessarily wrong. In fact, the only learning I would list out before I go on with it, and call necessary and underrated, is the lack of any learning and bias before you start a new chapter. There is a strange comfort in learning about and accepting yourself. This comfort is probably the best takeaway one could aim for from these 4 years, one that is absolute in its ‘value’ and generality and one that I was lucky to have taken (at least I hope so). The first and the biggest challenge in the quest for this comfort, personally, remained the biases and presumptions that I carried with me into this campus, including everything from a gross overvaluation of myself to the concreteness of the definitions of success and happiness. So, the only sincere advice would be to recalibrate your moral compass, to bring up all the fundamental and forgotten debates and conversations that must have ended in sweeping and absolute conclusions, and test them out in the context of this new and in many senses, extreme settings. I do not recommend or expect you to derive any learnings or hacks to college life from this mediocre recollection of 4 years’ worth of memories, hazed and spotted by extreme intoxication, and with unapologetic levels of cognitive bias. At most, this should serve as a leisure summer reading which makes up for its mediocrity in writing, with the contextual relevance in that it’s an honest take on life at what might be your home for the next 4 years The rest of this writing is purely a personal set of opinions that you may not relate at all with, but probably would serve as a food for thought. It is not actually an account per se of things that happened to me. I would probably call it a snapshot of my mind as it is right now which probably won’t hold true even a year from now. I have also, not exactly by a lucid intention but by the forces of flow, taken the liberty to trade its contextual relevance to you, the reader, with the selfish motive of immortalizing my opinions which one is very proud of, at the age which I am at now, with probably the last shot at doing so that I am going to get.

A quick baseline of facts about anyone in IIT Roorkee can often be formed by the conclusions of the orderly chaos that the first year is. My first year was fairly typical, not of my own choice or doing, but because of the consistent and overwhelming flurry of activities and events, aggressively marketed and deceptively tailored for the thousand impressionable minds that had set foot in the campus. Among a week worth of orientations, dozens of intro talks, hundreds of channeli notices, a handful of ‘politics’ initiations, and countless posters rammed over one another desperately calling for attention and fighting over one little peek from the freshers who frequented water coolers, washrooms and verandas of Rajendra Bhawan, I briefly found myself using my phone’s calendar and events feature to keep track of them, a habit that I, somewhat poetically, would only later indulge in, in my 4th year, with placements and all. It may sound very tedious and overwhelming, but those couple of months were probably the most mentally expansive experience of my life. At the end of it, I emerged as an Editor in Geek Gazette and an involved and curious stakeholder of the Campus politics (and later, joined ShARE and E-Cell or EDC as it was called back then, in the second semester). Reflecting back, my only regrets stemmed from the Intro talks and events that I missed, on the pretext of the presumptions seeded by random advisors, manifested in the form of know-it-all freshers, seniors driven by personal agendas and my own ill-informed judgements.

The first and probably the most vivid memory that I have of my first year is my first meeting as the member of the Edit cell of Geek Gazette. The absolute account of it, i.e. that it was a small gathering of 15-20 people outside library on a lazy Sunday afternoon discussing about music, acoustics, its psychological effects and later about death, war and what it must’ve been like to live in the times of the great wars, might not be that special of a deal to a lot many people, but it was everything and a little bit more to me. I had spent all my childhood in a small town, in a small school, which was barely bothered about anything that wasn’t directly directed by the CBSE (and even failing at a passable implementation of the CCE program introduced in the last few years of my school). Later, I lived in Chandigarh for two years, but I was extremely focused at all things JEE to care about anything else in the world. Hence, this small gathering, I realised, was the first time that I was a participant of a conversation, the subjects of which did not comprise of people and things that were in my immediate acquaintance or concepts and ideas that did not hold any professional value to me. It was the first time I realised how profound and enriching experience it is, to discuss things that did not necessarily affect you at all, and it felt like such an obvious fact as if I had known it ever since I was born. I remember being absolutely silent and stupefied in my first meeting. Eventually, I found my voice and my confidence and without any tinge of any doubt, I credit the biggest part of the formation and development of my ideas, my morality, my individuality and my humble skills of critical thought, speech and writing to this set of people. Even outside this, the group as a whole was where I spent my most memorable times. It is truly reminiscent of an actual proper big family. I celebrated all the festivals with them, went on the most amazing and memorable trips, as one does with family. I found the best guidance, tremendous emotional support, almost parental love and found myself at the giving end too, albeit quite rarely, as one does with family. I found people that stuck throughout my college life as my most trusted drinking partners and most entertaining dancing partners, people who made me feel special, people I was never embarrassed to put up a show for, as one does with family. I even found people I did not necessarily get along well with, yet whom I had the utmost respect for, as one does with family.

The other event that ended up majorly defining my perspective of how I saw and felt about the campus, and also a cause of great expectations, inspirations and disappointments that came about in my campus life through the 4 years, was my involvement in the political scenery of IITR, through an active involvement in the elections, serving in the student political machinery, a failed attempt at leading an initiative and a keen involvement as an observer throughout. Now, politics, necessarily, does not mean the appeasement of gullible and uninterested stakeholders in order to assume ‘power’ or recognition, even though it is sometimes reduced to it. The larger, often under-addressed part of it, involves the policy-making, execution and an understanding of the student role and representation in the college administration. The kind of structure and functioning of the society that most of us experience throughout our lives and the sheer numbers in this huge country and even relatively, in the campus, often leads one to think of oneself as a pawn of the system, at its mercy or at most, a consumer of the service provided by it and bound by the responsibilities and expectations that it asked of oneself. However, it is essential for everyone to realise that they themselves constitute the system and hence, bear complete right, responsibility and even accountability of all the characteristics of the system. Generally, I observed a huge leap in this regard in just the 4 years of my existence in the campus, where we went from an administration almost unapproachable and dictatorial, and a lack of any platform to raise, converse about or redress issues, to an exponentially more empathetic administration and the formation of SAC IITR Discussion Forum where everything from personal matters to issues of institute-wide importance are duly discussed. The institute administrative system, especially now, is such that it allows for a lot of student intervention and innovation at every level of its operations. Even apart from being at an elected position, there’s a large scope of what can be achieved with the right passion and effort. At exploiting a student-friendly system like this though, we fail often and terribly at the lack of feeling of social responsibility, community and the common good. I can count on my fingers the number of people who I have observed having a selfless concern and intent for the college, and I am not discounting those with a difference of opinions. What my point of bringing up this conversation is, when you find yourself be a part of this campus, or any other campus, a campus group or any other group, you need to assimilate your existence in it with the existence of the group itself and bear what comes it and not think of it as two different entities in a transactional relationship. You have not availed or subscribed to its services, you have as much of ownership, right and responsibility as any of its other part. Hence, even if it is out of a feeling of little gratitude that you feel for it, do be involved. You play a part in making it what it is. Change what you don’t feel is right. Raise your voice, support, debate and stand up for things that possibly do not directly concern you. I am proud of doing so when I have and regret whenever I did not.

The other big influence on my college life from this time was the fact that I lived on the second floor of C-Block. As a wise man said that the most genius minds of this country might just be sitting on the back benches of the classrooms. Well, replace genius by ingenious and the back benches by CS floor (effectively the back bench of Rajendra Bhawan), and that’d be a fact. The dungeons, that creaked in screams of pain and horror at the stroke of midnight of the birthdays of its inhabitants and that scared away the most serious of academicians terrified by the howls of the hunting parties in prowl of anyone serious enough to be studying even on the night before the exams, turned us all into the men we are. I trace my deepest and oldest friendships, and ones that I’m sure will outlast all tests of time and distance, to that floor. In the later years, that role had been overtaken by Jawahar Bhawan. Partly because most of that bunch ended up in Jawahar and partly because of the undoubted supremacy of JB in all things ‘fun’ as you’d soon find out. In a way, in fact, Jawahar has been one of the most prominent part of my college life in that I have spent the greatest amount of time in this Bhawan. Funnily, I never even was a resident of it, ever. Even till my last days in college, a lot of people had a hard time believing this fact because of how they had frequently and almost exclusively met me inside those walls. We’re often so fixated on the glories of the milestones and reduce our stories to a series of ‘special’ happenings, that we strip away the significance of our routines and what lies between the milestones. There is a special set of songs, a special set of voices and a periodic ringing of specific phrases, which constituted the background music of my life. A stark difference that my experience had with those of the others is that I never grew attached or cared a lot about any of the rooms I lived in. Instead, I led a very nomadic life and there is a set of rooms throughout the campus that each hold much more significance to me than all of my rooms combined. It is there where I sang at the peaks of my absolutely awful voice, explored and expressed the deepest of my thoughts, had the most engaging conversations, became my most social and antisocial self, met my share of creative geniuses, found refuge from the worst of my traumas and in the process, formed the best memories.

Another frequent feature of influence which had nothing and everything to do with Roorkee was the internships. I was fortunate (or unfortunate?) enough to land all three of mine in the beautiful city of Bangalore, which without hesitation I will term as my third home. It is here that I, most importantly learnt what matters to me the most and what kind of work would probably keep me happy for the rest of my life. It’s funny how internships are about ‘exposure’ and learning about the world outside when actually, it is the most introspective experience and you end up learning the most about yourself. It is the conversations and experiences I had with the tremendously diverse and successful alumni that R has everywhere, with my colleagues and supervisors, working all kinds of jobs and in all kinds of places that really put things in perspective for me and helped me make the most crucial choices. Bangalore is probably the city that I love the most among all that I have lived in. Its enchanting pink night skies, pleasant rains and glittering lights evoke nostalgia and yearning as strong as my own home. In the busiest of the roads, I found myself lost and alone and in the tiniest of rooms, I felt fulfilled with great company. In the loudest of music, everything seemed to come to pause and silence and in the solace of a peaceful corner nestled with books, I had the loudest conversations with myself. I had my ‘tunnel song’ moments and my craziest adventures, the kind I’d never thought I’d do, in this city. I discovered great passions here. I learned to live. To live by myself and to live with others. That is what Bangalore was for me.

If I am to highlight the most prominent contrast in my first year batch and the most recent one, the defining difference will be the ever-increasing ambition driven exclusively by forces of security, prosperity and ‘career’, a shift similar to what places like IITB are living in the aftershocks of. That might sound all great and rosy, but this exact thing has been the subject of many debates I’ve had with myself and a number of fellow stakeholders of the system with similar understanding and concern of the campus. Most of the arguments and conclusions might be quite noncontextual and even to an extent, irrelevant to you, but the reason why I bring it up is to represent an endangered opinion. One that argues for a greater participation in things that necessarily and directly do not seem to contribute to your ‘careers’, the levels of participation reminiscent of the good old days (I say old, but statistically speaking, the number of people auditioning for performing sections of the Cultural Council has declined from something like 250-300 to a mere 70-80 just in the last 4 years). It’s easy to get lost in the overwhelming façade of the various pathways promising success, fuelled by the jargon of impressive-sounding words like Data Science, ML, AI, UI/UX and what not, and hop into their chase, similar to that of a horse in a race, who has no idea of where and even what, the finishing line is, and who in his limited periphery of visions, sees only the path paved in front of her. Luckily, we are more than horses, we are not bound by leashes, nor do we have flaps on our eyes. Yet, it baffles me how we behave as we do. Now, I am not at all dismissive or disrespectful of people who do wholeheartedly pursue things that are ‘career-oriented’. I simply make a case for things that do not necessarily promise you tens of thousands in cash if you win a competition and that do not promise you job at the end of your 4 years and hence, are not equally incentivised, partly by the fault of the society that we live in today, and partly because of the various levels of administration that choose to be as naïve, even when they’re well equipped to not be so. Heck! Not even that. I make a case for passion, if one finds it in the stuff I mentioned above, then so be it. You’d have to be extremely lucky to find a place like this after you graduate, where you can have as much freedom and as many opportunities to try whatever you want to. It’d be a shame to waste all of it doing things that people want you to.

Paraphrasing the famous quote in a more modern context, coding, data science, research, these things might be necessary to survive and have a good, prosperous life, but art, poetry, dance, these are the things that make it worth living. Hence, it is a well-informed, well-experienced and a completely humble request and suggestion to pick up one creative or mentally stimulating endeavour to find refuge in, to unwind and to unload all the frustrations of the constant struggle that lie outside the walls of that refuge. I, for a large part of the 4 years, suffered from the lack of such a refuge. Luckily, by a matter of chance, I found my little happy place. Mostly out of courtesy and respect and little out of curiosity, I attended a ‘BizTech’ Quiz by one of my magazine seniors in my second year. I absolutely sucked at it and did not even make the cut-off of the preliminary round. Now, those who know me well know this for sure, having been tormented by it often, that I love trivia, fundae, logic and stories behind every little thing. While this ‘passion’ had mostly been a cause of dislike and playful jibes everywhere else, this was a place where I actually could experience and express it to the fullest and even be rewarded for it. I made a point from then on, never to miss any quiz. In due time, I ended up being fairly okay at it. Now, there is absolutely no greater satisfaction and dopamine rush that I get than working out questions from scratch successfully, or when the trivia and fundae I encountered in a quiz trickle into my real life or when I see the most creative answers to the questions that I set and the feeling of reciprocated gratitude when I am able to provide a similar dopamine rush to the fellow quizzers. The trips to Kolkata, Kanpur and Lucknow with the boys also happen to be the best ones of the lot in terms of the endless learnings and perspectives. This might not qualify as truly ‘creative’ in the purists’ books but you’d have to see my fellow quizzers coming up with often bizarre, occasionally absolutely impressive but always the most creative answers to the equally wicked questions, to understand why I term it so. The other extremely important and enriching experience, and a creative endeavour of the purest definition was also almost serendipity for me. A half-joking conversation with a good friend and the absolute absence of purpose, works and expectations in the last semester led me to audition for a Dramatics Section’s play. That was probably the best decision that I took in a long long time. The truly creative and extremely challenging experience of being a part of a play, not only fulfilled my long withstanding yearning for a creative outlet, but also instilled in me, a deep appreciation for the performing arts and the pain of putting up a show and made me memories and learnings that I would rate nothing short of revolutionary in a personal perspective.

Among other things, I think or at least I hope to have been known, to those whom I had any level of acquaintance with, for an ever-changing dressing sense which probably never worked outside my own mind, and for a dash of ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘weird’ in the gestures and movements as well as in the humour (again probably never funny to anyone outside my extremely narcissist self when it came to that) which I unapologetically put on display. The reason to include this here, quite selfishly, is two-fold. Firstly, it’s a humble and well-meaning attempt at justifying this seeming juvenility to whoever was an unfortunate and unsuspecting spectator to this, and secondly, a highly ambitious and hopeful attempt at making a small difference in even one life, if I do achieve so. In mere 4 years, I have had a man bun, coloured hair, a phase where I just wore shorts even in the peaks of winter, an extreme love for flip flops and an adventurous fascination for things I am ‘not supposed to wear’ by the virtue of them being not masculine enough or at all. Generally, for most of the intricacies of our mind and behaviour, one can only hope to fully understand them or make a passable attempt at doing so. Over the years, I came up with two theories that did the latter. The first finds its roots in my fascination with aliens and outliers of my immediate environment. I hope and believe it is not a cliché since only then they would actually be the outliers. A common trait that I observed in such elements gnawing at my fascination was their complete disregard to anyone and everyone’s opinion of them, at least at the surface. Now, you see where I am going with this. The second and possibly, the one closer to the reality, is that I believe that I fed on the ‘discomfort’ that I and my behaviour evoked. The absolute power of being able to make someone uncomfortable by the virtue of very trivial things such as how I looked or what I jokingly said or how I danced or moved my hands, was probably what had driven it. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do not reside my absolute and final satisfaction of this act in the mere discomfort that I caused, but in the introspective conversation that might have been invoked then or probably now, of how we have given trivial things so much power to cause discomfort to us, through years of social conditioning, the extremes of which lead to so many hate crimes and an endless feeling of loneliness, insecurity and fear to those who do so just to be who they really are, and unlike myself who is just an imposter quite selfishly being funny about it. I hope I could be more simplistic and absolute in the way that I chose to say this, but I guess I am afraid too. This campus luckily, fared much better than the world outside its walls, in being receptive and sporting about such behaviour and I hope you find it to be the same. Having said that, it is still far from being perfect but I see some steps in the right direction already.

All of this might seem extremely self-centred and to an extent, narcissistic but I justify it in the learning I took too long to finally learn. Not only is one the protagonist of their story, they are also the authors of it and hence have special liberty to over-represent themselves. It is easy, sometimes, to lose track of that. To always place someone at the director’s spot, to put up a show for him/her/them, is an easy pit to fall into especially with the plethora of inspiring figures I am sure you’ll all be lucky to be in the company of. However, at the end of the day, it is essential to be mindful of who you really are and what truly makes you happy. We put so many masks everywhere every day that our own true face sometimes takes the backstage. The thing that I struggle the most with, now, is to one-by-one get rid of the masks that I have taken so long to perfect.[a] No matter how hard anyone tries to make a comprehensive collection of the most perfect of the masks, it is impossible to please the whole audience. Instead, there is greater comfort and solitude at keeping it real.

Of course, I owe everything about my college life to a small set of people who miss out at being explicitly mentioned here, by virtue of this being a public account rather than a personal one. I owe it to them who made me be comfortable with who I am and accepting of my shortcomings. You know who you are. I owe it to them who gave me a feeling of security and belonging greater than what I felt at home, at times when I needed it the most. You know who you are. I owe to them who always made me have these conversations with myself and with them and who showed me what mindfulness and the simple act of observing your thoughts can do. You know who you are. I owe it to them who were always a call away to share in the celebrations of the greatest victories and the sorrows of the crushing defeats. You know who you are. I owe to all of them who were the most trusting comrades, the most inspiring generals and the most loving troops. You know who you are.

I hope I put up a decent show.

It’s all love.