Acclimatising to the New World!

2303 Kilometres

Everyone reaches their own destiny.Some of them create their own path while some sail with the flow of the time. I stand in the latter queue. I never got the chance to create my destiny; I just went with the flow. My journey is like those stereotypical west meet east kind of journey. Well,it has quite an adventurous start out of nowhere, I got landed in the land of the sweet 'ROSOGOLLAS' i.e.Kolkata, all the way from the very colorful Gujarat.

People are not wrong when they say "Don't judge a book by its cover!". I did the same mistake. 12 days into the campus and I had already thought of passing the next 2 years here in a very mundane manner and every second I was longing to turn the clock back to my engineering days. My hangover of all the fun I had at my previous hostel had not yet diluted because I just went at my home for 2 days before coming to Kolkata. That made me long for my college friends and my two-wheeler rides a lot. Even before I get some time and space to move on, a very interesting phenomenon started at IIFT. A 3 lettered devil caused so much chaos in my mind that barely I could think of any thoughts. My mind went numb and I started living life on auto-pilot mode. The devil I am talking about is IAP-Induction and Acculturation Process. A rigorous exercise which goes on for 10 long days is enough to totally exert you physically and mentally. I will not indulge in more details as I believe it should be kept surprise to coming batches as it was kept to us. 

The climax of it was very interesting. The process had already reached its peak where I had my mental breakdown. I had slept a total of 4 hours in last 96 hours and still we weren't appreciated for our efforts. It seemed like an abyss and there was no light at the end of this tunnel. I was hallucinating and I could hear some loud shouts right in my ears even when I was awake (Well,not really!! I had turned into a walking body). Last evening we got one mail stating "Batch meet at 6.45 pm" and my first reaction was I am not going and I will sleep as I don't care anymore but then again out of peer pressure I changed into my formals and went to the allocated room with no energy to withstand a single more hour of this process. As I entered the room, I saw a different glimmer on the face of the MBA 2s. I sensed something grave. The bashing today was much more accelerated. Some other students too had same breakdowns as mine and this lead to 5 students reiterating back and quitting the process. We were bashed even more after that. We were insulted and instructed to remove our blazers and ties and to empty our pockets. We were escorted then to the dark corner of parking area of hostel. We saw MBA 2s surrounded us from all the 4 sides on every floor and they shouted at us. All our anger found the voices and we reverberated back. And suddenly a gush of cold water hit our head and we heard drums playing Punjabi beats. We were all confused at once before realising it was a Welcome Party given to us by MBA 2s and the previous atrocities were just a set up. Our roars became even louder as our cries of anguish turned into peal of joy. Our legs couldn't stop and we danced in the wilderness for hours without even a pause of a nano-second. That was some welcome we got and we never saw it coming. The last sound I remember is all roaring in unison the paeans of IIFT in unison. "Go IIFT Go"!

When I Fell in love with a town...

Vallabh Vidyanagar- A place where magic happens.

10th July,2012- When I first set my foot into this small town designed only for education, I never thought leaving it would be so emotional. Vallabh Vidyanagar-an educational hub just 6 kms outside Anand, the milk capital of India, is a place where dreams are seen and fulfilled. I have fulfilled most of my dreams here in 1440 days I have lived in this town. 

When I came here 4 years back, I was a lot different person. I was a silly teenager, who was full of arrogance and made blunders in abundance. Coming to this city was much less than he deserved is what he thought but the fact was he just got lucky to even be studying in such prestigious Institute Birla Vishvakarma Mahavidyalaya. Never a person to be homesick, I took to this city as easily as a fish takes to river. Just excited by this new degree of freedom, I would experience away from my home, I was one person who never wanted to be at home. I embraced that freedom and started living out the best 4 years of my life. 

This city slowly started working its magic and started molding me into a person who I am now. The first year I spent greatly in exploring the city and each day was an experience. In my second year, I saw the first dream. A dream to be in a top B-School of India for my masters. I started working for it and I never knew just the preparation for CAT and the experience of taking it would change me so much. For the first time in my life, I found myself serious for something that I wanted badly and was ready to walk till the very last mile till I achieved it. For the first time I had goosebumps just at the thought of being successful and had massive tremors when I saw the fear of failure. 

There were so many emotions that I have experienced for the first time in this city. With each day passing, I was evolving and was learning to be more responsible person. I learnt here that it is not bad to accept the blame myself when things go south instead of always looking for a reason to exonerate myself which I had always done in my past 18 years. That helped me in never being in the same messy circumstance twice as I had learnt to accept my fault and knew where I was going wrong. 

I made friends with people and had best of my time here . With each passing here, I was falling in love. Yes, I realized I was always in love. Not with a person, but this place. Falling in love with a place feels a lot like hunger, but also satisfaction. There is this constant desire for more; all you can think about is seeing more and embracing it. The adventure consumes you. Moving around and exploring will satiate you; creating an overall feeling of warmth and full-on glee, but only temporarily. Of course, once you fall in love, it becomes cyclic: you constantly desire more of it, and the more you take in, the deeper you fall and the more you will wish to see. I will tell you now: Vallabh Vidyanagar is addictive and these feelings do not go away.

I have seen students around waiting for a day or two off with bags packed so that they can rush to their home at the first opportunity available but me being me, always tried to find the reason to avoid going to my home. I always said "What is there at home? You already stayed there for 18 years. It is now your opportunity to be a man with an individual identity with no shadow of your parents or sibling loitering around you." I have stayed in this city even when no one else did. I have seen this town in each of its color and celebrated each of its festival here.

Today at my last night in this hostel, I see my whole 4 year journey being flashed in front of me. The first friend I made, the first outing, the first movie, the first night out, the first exam, the first success and the first failure. I have always been a person with commitment issues. Yes I commit too strongly at times making it difficult for me to move on. That is why it took me a month more to prepare myself mentally to leave this city. After my exams got over and all my friends left permanently, some the same day itself, some after a week, I stayed for a whole extra month here to just fill in each and every joy of being in this city.

Many have tarnished the image of this town as a town where students get spoiled and ruin their careers, but to me this town never offered any malice and in fact made my career. Coming here stands one of the best decision of my life. There are so many memories and so many experience here that I am so sure I will never find in any corner of the world. The music playing always in background when I felt attachment and endearment with someone and the feeling of being broken when a harsh reality sank in that sometimes no matter how hard you try and how much you strive, somethings are not meant to be and you can do nothing about it. I learned to accept that sometimes you are helpless and you just have to let that time pass without trying too hard and getting caught deeper in the vortex. I have learnt a lot apart from engineering in this 4 years and this town has offered me a lot. I will never be able to repay it back but I am sure of one thing, I came in this place as a childish boy who could throw tantrums if he couldn't get what he wanted but will be walking out of here in few hours as experienced man who knows to deal with this world.

I am leaving Vidyanagar but Vidyanagar will never leave me as it is part of me now. Adios magical place.!!!

Growing Up: An experience not worth cherishing.

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others..

I thought about getting to write back my blog a long back but every time my laziness overpowered me. Finally, I made up my mind to write something on my 21st birthday and voila, here I am..Late by 3 days.

So I celebrated my 21st birthday 3 days back and felt special for a day and then I am back to being normal me. That is one thing I abhor about growing up. We stop being happy for too long. I guess the reasons for happiness is inversely proportional to our age. As we grow up, we are not just contended with simple pleasures of life. We as a human collectively are sadist creatures. We limit our own happiness. 

Yes, I miss being a kid. I can give anything to be that 6 month old infant whose world was his mother, to be that 2-3 years old toddler whose day was made just by fistful of cashew-nuts, to be that 5-6 year old stripling whose greatest pleasure in world was a tricycle ride around in colony, to be that 10 year old boy who was just excited by the thought of writing with ball-pens in school instead of pencil, to be that 12 year old lad for whom "Pikachu vs Charlizard" held much more importance than "Trump vs Clinton", to be that 15 year old teenage boy who was fancied by scooty run on electric battery and who used to get heightened sense of adrenaline rush just by smuggling a pen drive full of GTA games and installing them to his dad's PC and yes couple of extra hours of television always made the day memorable.

See the pattern, the wants increased with each passing year and life started complicating itself. Happiness was still so handy then. I honestly don't know what went wrong and when did I transformed into a man. Life became hard and happiness needed to be looked for . Today, a toy worth 20k ( a cell phone), a bigger toy worth 50k (a laptop), a two wheeler running on exorbitant fuel or a four wheeler 20 times the price of two wheeler is not enough to give happiness worth cherishing compared to a tricycle which needed just air in tire or a electrically charged motorbike which used to keep me excited for months.

The happiness because of this materialistic gains is so ephemeral. So what changed in a span of half a decade? Apart for physique and body structure, a most important thing changed. Our minds started looking for external esteem from people around us. We were so busy thinking about others around us that we had little time to ask our hearts how it felt. And once in a blue moon, if we ever did what our heart wanted, it hardly ended well. We are more worried about the acceptance we may get from the society than what makes us happy internally. That is the reason why some of us craves for all those likes on our photos and our statuses on social media and are busy uploading them instead of being in the moment and enjoying it. 

One more reason why I feel we are less and less happy with each passing day is that we are burdened with responsibilities,duties and expectations and it leaves us with very little room to be happy. All through life most people just cannot wait for the chance to become a "grown up" . Anticipating the chance to have more fun and more opportunities to do things that were always looked upon as being mature and cool. But when I realized I have turned 21 this year I decided on the one thing that I have wanted to hurry up and happen but now wish would slow down just a little bit. I look back at a time 3 year me foolishly applying my mother's lipstick all over my face, putting both the feet in over sized dad's shoes and taking a polythene bag in hand and pretending to go to office and falling down and crying just after one step. Yes, I was senseless but those memories still bring a smile on my face. Now that I am grown up and doing all "sensible" things, I don't think any of them would make me smile 10-20 years down the line.

I wish I had never grown up. It’s just too sudden. It feels as if it was only yesterday that when I had no worries. I could look back and have no regrets. I didn’t feel as if I had to satisfy someone for it to be okay to be me. Life is full of responsibilities.When I was little the future was so far away I didn’t give a damn about what I wanted to be when I grew up. “I can think about that later.” Now, everything is so close. We didn’t even realize the journey we’ve been through, we were just living. The world we knew was lost its innocence. It’s gotten colder. Colder than I could remember. Our eyes have opened. As soon as you grow up, it’s not the same. People around you, wanting to pursuit you to their costumes and turn you into one of them. Protecting yourself from the outside world, you wouldn’t want to talk to no one. How can you know for sure someone is not going to destroy you? Who will betray you? 

Growing up hurts, it’s full of nostalgia. Remember the old cartoons you used to laugh your butt off, the times when you couldn’t stay up passed nine o’clock. Having that pure untouched mind of your own. The hardest decision was what ice cream flavor you wanted. Why do some people want to run away from their childhood? The silliness and the goofiness. What happened to having a good time playing outside with your friends or siblings? They want to grow up already. They want to get out of school as soon as possible they want to go away to college to be away from their parents. To a new apartment, a new city. Yes, you are alone now. Yes, you can do whatever you want now. Yes, it’s your house, but it’s not the home you grew up in. It doesn’t have that warm feeling. You may say that you are glad to be away from your “naggy” parents. One day they will be gone. You are getting older, they are getting older too. You’ll get homesick every now and then. Your mom’s old cooking, playing with your dad outside. Once you grow up, it’s gone.

If only I had a remote control for life. I would go back to the good times, forward the sad times, re-live the awesome times, and pause the moments that are slipping through my fingers. But times won’t stop. Time waits for no one. That’s what memories are for. Sure, some may not be as happy as others, but they are proof that you lived, you had a good time, you cried, and you are human. Memories are with us forever. To teach us. To remind us. To show us, that growing up is part of life. You are born, you grow up, and you die. That’s how’s been. That’s how it will always be.Although, I think everyone needs to grow up at some point in their lives, we should still remain a little kid at heart. We need to keep the youthful happiness in our hearts for the future. We can remain grown up, but with that childish happiness still inside of us. We can grow up, without ever having to grow up.