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In this 28th edition of As We Leave, Sai Praneeth Donthu, a Y21 from the Department of Mathematics and Scientific Computing, looks back at a life shaped by sweltering summers, late-night walks, and the quiet company of a crow outside Hall 9. His journey was never linear — more a janky cassette of scattered memories than a clean arc. From pandemic dormancy to chaotic sprints, from cynicism to deep care, from floating through mistakes to finding stillness, each semester added a glitchy, beautiful note.
This AWL is a tribute to misplaced photos, half-spoken goodbyes, and the bittersweet comfort of knowing that not remembering everything doesn’t mean it didn’t shape you.
Disclaimer:- The views presented below are the author’s own and are not in any manner representative of the views of Vox Populi as a body or IIT Kanpur in general. This is an informal account of the author’s experiences at IITK.
A life lived before, after and now
There are ever so many ways to write a memoir of one’s own youthful escapades into the newly found freedom that college so readily provides. It definitely is a stretch to call my experiences as “escapades” per se, but I might as well give myself the license to lie and exaggerate the grandeur of the life I lived here. Being honest, the only person who would like that version would be my younger pubescent self stuck up in my room in the peak of the pandemic. Of all the ways I could probably go about writing this, I think I’ll choose a more colourful way; it’ll probably be the closest to what my whole as a self went through in my overly imaginative head these past few years. Oh, it’ll be heavily exaggerated and pretentious, so be warned, reader. No Tl;dr’s 😉
Four years of history hit me with stunning lucidity the moment I sat to write this, and ironically enough the words to describe them evade me. I’m done with my run here and I’ll hate the fact that this history will wear down and age as I keep reminiscing and jumping at the same highlights time and again. Where and how do we start from here? Where do we go from here? These questions have been answered by those who came before in their own ways and no doubt I’ll find my own but it fascinates me that such questions are perennial. Maybe that’s a reason why we have such a thing as AWL’s – because we have our own twist on such questions that keep testing each generation and challenges us to search for the perspective that nevertheless defines us. For now though I’d rather focus on one question – How do I start this AWL?
The first and most prominent thing I will forever remember about the campus is the heat and the summers. I remember the charcoal breath that hit my face as I stepped out of the airplane, the first time I landed in Kanpur. It therefore goes without saying that I hate the summers in this city; I’m more of a winter guy. And yet as I leave, the last summer feels a tad bit more nostalgic than the long gone winter. While the winters have been more serene and calm with not much to do but hibernate with a nice book in hand, the summers have been chaotic and unruly, bringing out the scintillating colours of everyday life in the campus. I hate the summers in this city, but I’ve grown all the more fond of it for all the colours that light up the campus as soon as the first signs of spring arrive. The variety of flowers I’ve seen are just not found in the city from where I hail from. Countless days of cycling towards classes in a shower of leaves and petals shook from the light wind of spring only cement this memory. If you know me, you know that I love flowers.
I’ve also grown fond of the memories of the many summer nights which only twinkled with the stars above and the light from mischievous eyes embroiled in sophomore college drama. Those nights were filled with gossips underneath streetlights that flickered with the crowding pests. Those nights, we were the nuisance with our dope fuelled ruckus and music that unsettled the creatures of the night whose job it was to never let us sleep. Those were the initial nights that we spent running from campus end to campus end in search of ghosts, rooftops and promises made under an empty sky and an open heart. The absence of light only lets us fill the canvas of night with our own colour, such were those nights, now relics of a bygone era, an era of juvenility. Throughout all the dramas and the-not-so-very-complicated complications that college life later added to my life (which previously as a kid was just mundanity known between four walls and a playground), the only thing I wish to take away and remember is the bittersweet nostalgia held in the faces of close friends and in every green leaf and red brick of the campus.
If you’re reading this, then you’re either someone who knows me, someone who is looking back into their pasts or someone who believes that they can see the future by reading AWL’s. I used to think that although we have the same four years, nothing and everything is nearly the same. Again goes back to what we started with; we all have our own twist to this thing. Makes it all the more beautiful.
Leo's Toystore
On one sweltering April day, perched atop a ledge, I noticed a crow. At a time, where most of the campus wildlife is usually cowering away in their dens and nests from the unforgiving sun, the crow seemed relentless in its posture. What caught my curiosity was the fact that I’ve been noticing the same crow during the same hours of the day for weeks. This episode of college ends for me soon and in one way or another I feel that I can relate to the crow. In this fast-paced and competitive environment that our college unknowingly gives us, with months on end with no respite whatsoever, I often found myself perched upon my own ledge of comfort – as I do even now. Unlike the majority of final year students who fight tooth and nail to get any available room in the prestigious rundown that is Hall 1, I preferred the relative peace and comfort of Hall 9. My room faced south, towards Hall 10 and 11, which meant that every evening during sunset, I used to be able to see the huge flock of crows, that the particular road to Mama Mios is known for, flying hither thither and cawing up a storm. It often served as a reminder to take a break for me and at which time I’d look outside and count all the crows I could until I got bored or fell asleep at my desk.
There was a massive rainstorm the other morning and ever since then I’ve stopped seeing that crow and now whenever I look out my window at sunset, I try, in a flash of senseless stupidity, to catch a glimpse of that crow. Wonder where it is now.
These memories of crows and flowers come from a place of nostalgia. I’ve never questioned the role that nostalgia has played in my life but the weight of it has grown stronger. I’ve started to feel a bit resentful of it – It has always treated me unfairly. I guess the colour we give to those black and white days, the way we romanticize them and make way around all our bad decisions and mistakes feels unfaithful to my past self that went through it. The bitterness laced in these feelings isn’t so subtly hidden.
Under duress of my own conscience, I will have to admit that I’ve become a bitter person. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is the opener of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I’ve always been aware and kinda obsessed with the life and times of Tolstoy ever since as a kid I watched Charlie search for a book named “Leo’s Toystore” by “Warren Piece” (which is what Charlie mistook for the famous War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy ) from “The Peanuts Movie” which was based on the celebrated comic strip. As a content kid with no more to ask but for the latest hot wheels car or the TV remote, it never struck me as it does to me now. We all suffer in our own pools of self-doubt, misgivings, and consequences to our actions and we all try to jump out. Maybe we need to start by learning to swim. Both literally and figuratively, I’ve only ever managed to float.
I prefer the solace of my own room these days rather than the more crowded areas of the campus. It comes from a place of understanding and whatever little maturity I hope to have gained over the course of the last year. We’ve all been naive when we’ve entered college and seen the sprawling acres of red and green for the first time, bubbling with buoyant excitement and floating to make friends with every last person. And as the years pass, some people do manage to maintain every single relationship despite the dramas, but I for one feel that I’ve been able to see both the best sides of people and also the most horrible ones. No wonder we prefer animals and dogs.
Clearly I’ve changed. I’m not the old version of me from my first year who was overly cautious and scared, who thought twenty times as if a late night walk in the nighttime heat would over dehydrate me. Do I like the version of me that I’ve become?
AWL the mess I've made
I must admit that I’ve very clearly demonstrated that I may have symptoms of ADHD in the way I have gone about writing the AWL but bear with me, I feel that that’s what college was to me – a janky cassette tape with sporadic moments. Nothing was ever linear, time was always wonky, it was as if the bell tower rang at its own pace. On one hand there are some semesters that I can barely remember head or tail, whereas on the other there are others which are etched into my memory. An argument can be made that life in general works in the same way, but I felt that it was more noticeable to me with semesters which are quite short. Either way, forgive me for the horrible AWL I’ve written.
Take for instance my first semester at college, which due to the pandemic was cut short and squeezed into three months of online meets, countless co-op games and ever so little academics. We were fed a falsehood of college life which we knew at the time but all we could do was will the pandemic rates go down so that we could taste the real deal. Those days are vivid, despite the lack of activity beyond the desktop chair, for even though it was online, the essence of first year college life was to some extent felt through all the friends I’ve made back then (and are still cheering each other on at the finish line). I would feel that we had gotten the very best ending to the online semester since we were greeted by Ritviz, the very week we had come to campus and in a sudden instant we started to feel what real college felt like.
And just like that ever since the fervor towards this newfound freedom to explore , connect and have fun vanished, the months and then the semesters began to merge into one continuous flow of lectures, exams and everything in between. Each of the following semesters that followed were not marked by the immature things that we did, the fests, the parties and what not, but rather surprisingly the littlest of events, be it in our jangled up routines, the courses that we took, or the friendships we took ever so granted. These moments, locked behind some forgotten gate, live a lonely existence in the thousands of photos we took of ordinary life which do not serve their intended purpose of bringing back memory but rather end up being deleted. Even now, as I scroll through the countless photos that eat away at my drive, I come across a motley of photos that I’m sure held some stupid meaning that I sorely wish to remember but only end up dumping them. I just hope those moments exist in time somewhere in some dimension far away that I can access and cherish.
Recency bias plays a huge deal in this mismatched and inconsistent set of memories. The semesters toward the backend of college were more happening in general than those in the middle and I’m sure that I’m not the only one who feels this way. All this has only made me conclude that we only remember the beginning and the ending of things and that in my opinion is the most unfair thing we can do to something that we claim to cherish as something that is life changing and central to our personality.
Life here has been worth my heart that I can give regardless of all the forgotten memories, for they still have had an effect on me as a whole, now and forevermore.
A society of hypocrites
The counselling service made us take a piece of paper with our ranks written on it and burn it up in our first year. This was supposed to ingrain in us the fact that our ranks ,and metrics decided by some test, do not matter. I guess they need to tell us, the last years’, to do the same thing but now with our CPI’s; after all it too is a metric. For all the symbolism and all it’s worth with its deep meaning or whatever it all feels very shallow when you realise that the same people who serve this gyaan to unsuspecting juniors are the same bunch of people who’d do anything to get a higher grade.
The definitions of life, achievements and success grew a new dimension the moment I stepped into college. All of a sudden I was not only bad in one thing but now I was bad in a multitude of things. All of a sudden I did not know what I wanted – the freedom of the careless moon, or the discipline beneath the watchful sun. People often quote that the“Jack of all trades is the master of none” but nine out of ten people forget that he/she is still “oftentimes better than the master of one”. I’m no sort of enlightened saint, rather a hypocrite myself. I’ve always believed that the rat race is never worth it – but at the end of the day I’ve always run behind CPI, placement and all those other things. It’s a heavy expense that I had to pay for this.
And at what expense? The expense I had to pay for not being genuine to myself in this journey was the foot of failure on my face time and again. All of a sudden life was never about working hard enough and you’ll get it but it now was work hard and true to yourself and you might get it.
Does this mean that I’ve changed? Nope, not at all. I’m a hypocrite, like the rest of us. At Least I have no regrets.
A self portrait not self painted
Being grateful for the life I’ve been giving and the circumstances that led me to this very instance somehow does not feel sufficient to clear the debt that I owe. They say that an IIT is an IIT for its people; now that the campus is getting more and more desolate and the wildlife is being spotted again, it feels less and less like home. I don’t hate it though, I can re-explore the place one last time, from the sunsets on top of hall 10 to the desolate forestry just beyond the old shop, on my own terms. All I need are the songs attached to the night and the memories I so long to revisit and the shoes of Hermes to flit past the SIS guards to places I’m not allowed to visit. Like the 7th floor of the residential apartments! Do go there, you’ll find a staircase that starts and leads to nowhere.
Time deceives us and we never realise how much one changes, but photos and videos never do. I too have changed throughout the years. The bangalore accent that I used to be proud of has eroded away to a tongue that speaks a more northern accent. No one back home recognises me anymore; each time I’ve gone back it’s a whole new person they see stepping into the house. It’s the people here that’ve been responsible, and they have my thanks. I come from Bangalore, a mixing pot of a city, a city from where I’ve met people from multiple cultures and speak different languages and therefore when I came here, I was under the false impression that I would be comfortable with people here in Kanpur. What I had failed to understand was that the people I had often interacted with are from the same shared background unlike those I was about to meet.
I’ve come across such a plethora of wonderful people and at the same time have come across horrible people. Both have done a great deal of justice to the claim that an IIT is an IIT for its people. Both have made a portrait of me that I will live only to cherish if not for anything else.
The topic of friends is probably one of the hardest things that I can think about, not because some friends have come and gone or some have left a bad taste or that some have just drifted apart, visible only at the far horizon. Rather it’s in knowing that there probably was something more you could have done or said, something different. Writing about all of them is only cementing the fact that it’s all done and dusted and you ought to let go now and let them go on their own paths. Writing about them only freezes them in this particular instant, which only puts more importance to each little word, verb and adjective you use. After all, college is all and only about the friends you make.
What words do I choose then? Giving any words as such grossly simplifies the way I feel towards some people. Do I throw praises, or verses rhyming from the book of a poet, or perhaps take individually name and fame them? This comes from a place of deep emotions, and for this moment I will let them talk about the way I feel for emotions are at the core of what makes us feel. If the campus and life had any colour, then these people gave it the vibrance. Thanks for each and every word and moment that you all felt was a good idea to spend with me.
It’s going to be hard to leave. That bit is for sure.
All the damned up tears
I’ve come to the end of my line here, I feel aged and I’ve been told that I’ve crossed over into old age already. I can already feel my knees cracking and my cataract thickening. The longer I stay here, the more my bed feels comfier and my eyes feel foggier. I’ve said all my thank yous and goodbyes, I’ve cried my share of tears, I’ve hugged all the people that matter to me and made peace with all the unfinished dramas and I’ve settled all my emotional and actual dues. What else is left?
In the end it’s not a teary eyed goodbye to this life here, but rather a melancholic one. Some people would wish to have a pensieve to visit all the good times, but I’d rather not. The reality of things is oftentimes much less enjoyable to reminisce on than what nostalgia gives us and I’m content with that. I’m sure to forget all the things that I wish not to, but it is the way it is. I’m content. We all know how this story ends, but we are so sorely underprepared for when it ends. Here’s to all the words that went unsaid, here’s to all the laughter that we never had, here’s to all the things we never did.
Here’s also to the full stop to end it all. It’s a pretty heavy one. Weight of a hundred million seconds.
Sai Praneeth Donthu
210900
Written by:Â Sai Praneeth Donthu
Edited by: Yeva Gupta, Siddharth Mahar
Designed by: Pankhuri Sachan, Pragya Puri
