Every year around this time, you may notice a considerable increase in the number of nostalgic posts and links to sad songs from the 80s. Mostly, it’s because Game of Thrones comes out around this time, but it’s more so because a batch just got done with this thing called college. Talking about Game of Thrones, one can draw a few similarities between the two things. Both of them suck the life out of you, make you despise those in charge, teach you not to get attached too much and finally leave you with a feeling of “WHAT? THAT’S IT? THAT LASTED FOR LIKE 14 FEMTO SECONDS”.
If you thought I was this generic blogger who absolutely cannot find any inspiration whatsoever to write about fresh topics and explore new and exciting lanes, you were probably right. I’m going to waste valuable megabytes on the internet to post something about the end of my college days.
Moving to a new city is always hard, just like the incredibly bad actor from the Nokia smartphone advertisements had told you. Moving to a new city for college is even harder. You are programmed by your brain to hate the educational institute you study in for your entire stay. Having a town that adds to the list of these complaints is far from ideal. Thanjavur never failed to provide these woes. Besides imparting me with valuable information on where to use the word ‘femto’, college was no lesser than one crazy ride. Any respectably good blogger takes on a topic and paints a vivid imagery of the subject using his control and command over the English language to cast a spell over your mind. Since I am not even mildly any of those words, I am going to tell you just how I managed to not die in the past 4 years.
Pretty much every middle aged friend of your father will flock to you after your board exams are over and ask you what your plans for the future are. Your answer is about as important to them as the brand tag inside their underwear. Regardless of whether you want to become a Electronics and Communication Engineer or a PET Bottle Service Engineer, you will always have that ‘scope’ if your plan involves the word Engineering. Some wise old football manager somewhere once said that a football match starts 2 hours before the actual match and ends only 2 hours afterwards. I don’t know the deep underlying meaning behind that statement but I know that it applies to the engineering process as well. The engineering circuit starts from when you’re in 11th or 12th and isn’t really over until you finish your MS/MBA or get comprehensively fed up of your IT job.
I don’t have any clue about the other courses and how the colleges for them are in India, but when it comes to engineering, almost the entire process is the same. Sure, there would be a few tweaks depending upon the leniency of your college, but the experiences all are the same. You start out like an enthusiastic boy in a race and fall face first within 2 minutes. The rest of the race is just you crawling in the expectation of a divine reward after finishing it. Ironically, despite the uncanny similarities college shares with organized religion, college usually makes people lose faith in any kind of god. It must take a deluded, downtrodden, defeated and mentally unstable person to say that they will miss life in an engineering college. Unfortunately, most of those adjectives describe the average engineering student perfectly.
Stuck in an aggressively orthodox Brahmin college, there are two ways you can get through. One way is to be a poster boy and dance to the whims of the other set of mentally unstable group of people who run the college and the alternate way is to just stay away from it. Like the BJP or any religious institution there is, you are branded as a threat to harmony if you choose against conforming to the way the administration wants to do things. This may also involve the mere act of wearing a black shirt to college because black is obviously the color of the devil and you are a devilish human being if you are wearing that shade to college. For those who choose against passionately caressing the rears of the professors, college basically turns into a tedious struggle to not get chucked out. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t particularly find the glamour associated with doing retarded things like organizing a techfest very appealing. This meant that my 4 years were just a drab routine of commuting back and forth from college and doing enough to keep my neck above the water.
Let’s look at this objectively. Would normal, sane, straight thinking, non architecture pursuing people want to bust their rears into drawing side views, top views and rear views of random shapes 2 times a week for 3 hours? Would anyone want to voluntarily sacrifice whatever of their social life remains in exchange for night outs for an exam they only have a 30% chance of passing? Would you want to sacrifice your life to an orthodox institution that stopped a pro night show because the performer was wearing a tank top? No? Thought so.
Given a choice, I would say no to every single one of those questions again but where’s the nostalgic spirit in that? So apart from all the irrationally stupid things a Brahmin guy running a college tries to shove down your throat, it’s the irrationally stupid things the other guys around you do that makes this worthwhile. However, things have an expiry date and you’re branded some sort of a Rahul Gandhi if you continue doing that long enough. College life may pretty much just signify the end of that. In light of the allowed stupidity quotient coming to a halt, the sub standard generic blogger expresses his nostalgia into moderately long words to seem culturally relevant.
Here’s to 4 years of cutting class for a sitting and sitting down for a cutting. To the advanced mathematical prowess exhibited in calculating my attendance lag. To the various times I’ve been ripped off in the name of Breakage Dues and Personality Development fees. Here’s to 4 years I’ll probably think twice about wanting back but never actually getting back. Here’s to leaving this place with a heavy heart and about 74 mildly abusive expletives.
The Daily Offensive 