fun Ends; Life begins ...

It seems just yesterday that I had cracked up a herculean exam and secured my place in a prestigious technical institute. What a sense of jubilation that was. Leaving those cozy-comfy school days behind and setting up a career path. Taking up engineering studies had alway been my dream an I was literally living in it. I was proud & my folks were prouder. I had great expectation from myself & saw a big change coming in the 4 years to-be.

Today, I stand at a juncture where I'm about to complete my undergrad and I feel a moral urgency to  retrospect these four years of my life. These four years where I had expected to become a specialist in my field, where I was supposed to carve a niche for myself, where I was supposed to become an 'engineer'. But, as it is said, life looks perfect only in the dreams, the realities are harsher. Something very similar happened in my case too.

First of all let me state some facts out right. Here in my country the 11th and 12th grades are undoubtedly the worse years of ones life. Its like we get a taste of hell even before we commence living our lives. We are made to run in a rat race, drudge incessantly for hours together and give-up everything there is to life just in a hope that we beat millions of other rats to enter these seemingly prestigious altars of technical learning. We are told that once you live through these years life would become a serving on a silver platter and we, being our naive selves, believe, only to realize later that it was all a hogwash. I was no exception to all this. Putting in about 15 hours of work daily, 7 days a week, which included school, private coaching and self study, i was by any standard one of the most productive individual on this planet. I became a social pariah, gained 15 kilos but ended up in this engineering college & told myself that the worse is over now. Relax.

Now that I look back, relaxation was the only thing I did seriously during my engineering. My productive time went down from 15 hours a day to 15 hours per semester. Earlier even a single movie per week was a luxury, then I started watching two a day and then three. We as humans get used to good things fast and this is exactly what happened. Studies & work became a thing of the past, or literally, a thing to be done just a day before the exams. I became so lazy that even typing a blog became too much of an exercise(:-P). No doubt, after those two hellish years I needed a break but I never came to know when this break turned into a habit and then into a lifestyle.

Here, at the end of four years my heart fills with melancholy when I think what I've achieved. Am I a specialist in computers as I dreamed of becoming?? Hell no. Sometimes even a question of a 9th grader renders me quizzical. On paper I'm one of the consistently good performers in my courses but somewhere in the back of my mind I feel feeble and incapacitated to tackle real world challenges. Whether this is due to the continuous dallying I did for the last few years or is it that everyone, even those who did pursue engineering the way it was meant to be, feel the same way, I don't know.

This brings me to the central point I want to express. It is time to gear up. Now is the time to free myself from the shackles of my lazy self. Whether I pursue a job or further studies, I know that I'll have to leave my current habits back in the college where I cultivated them. I'll have to bring back that old 11th grader inside myself again. I know it would be difficult, but then again so is Life!!

and the reincarnation ....

So here I'm again, typing off my mind after what has been nearly two years. First things first, let me establish the ground rules ....

1. no one asks why I was comatose for so long ....
2. no one asks what I have achieved in the past couple of years ...

So lets get started ....