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"!