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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 IIT-K.
In this Epilogue Edition( cause we messed it up gang ) of AWLs 2026. Anushka Singh, a Y22 student in the department of Electrical Engineering, shares her journey which was actively guided more by the things she didn’t choose than the things she did choose. Her chapter at IITK happens to be something which will never come again, but leaves her book of life altered forever. She reinforces the idea of beauty of the mundane, mentions her core – Aquatics, Ariel Robotics, the people who made her “ordinary” days as events in this beautifully crafted AWL.
I love how time works. The illimitable, forever rushing waves of it. It strikes you dumb, renders you speechless.
When it’s the last day, and you’ve cried, and watched your friends leave one by one, and finally felt the weight of all those goodbyes, you realize that grief is just proof that you were lucky enough to have something worth missing.
The people with whom you ranted about everything: the courses, the exams, the profs, all the campus gossip. The late night yaps. Sleeping on each other’s beds because nobody felt like going back to their own room. The parties that somehow became core memories. The evergreen jokes.
Through all the anxieties and fears and ups and downs of college, what ends up remaining is the people. Their presence, their laughter, and the countless ordinary moments that quietly stitched themselves into your life. Time flew away so fast that I didn’t even realise when they stopped being characters in a chapter of my story and became the recurring leitmotif that shaped the music of my life.
Endings feel so disorienting. They force you to see the shape of something while you’re losing it. For years, these moments felt ordinary while they were happening. And now, the whole thing feels strangely tragicomic.
The dots once looked so disconnected and so random, it was hard to believe it was all part of the same picture. But somewhere along the way, without ever announcing itself, change happened. You became a little louder, a little braver, a little more comfortable with not having all the answers.
The things I thought would define my college experience barely lasted a semester in my memory. When you look back, what survives is rarely what you expect. The milestones blur together. The stresses expire…
…and all that remains is memories.
But before all of this, life had become something I was constantly grading myself on. That’s how it has been for most of us, right?
Maybe it began when everything started to have a number attached to it. Marks. Ranks. Percentiles. When I simply began converting feelings into achievements because achievements felt easier to justify. And that continued here. I thought a great internship would finally make me feel accomplished. I thought winning the medal would provide the validation I seemed to be perpetually chasing. So I kept trying to achieve more and more, always convinced that satisfaction was waiting patiently behind the next milestone.
The trouble with living this way is that the horizon keeps moving. You arrive at places you once dreamed about, only to find yourself staring toward the next milestone. The satisfaction never quite catches up. Time doesn’t even give you the dignity of noticing when it passes.
But if these years have left me with anything, it is this. If you zoom in close enough, you’d find it was never about the grand narratives after all, but the little things <3 you start to notice once you stop trying to win.
After all, everything is a win when the goal is to experience.
So, I thought college would be all about achievements. What all my experiences ended up giving me was context. I learnt what I’m afraid of, what I’m capable of, and how wildly inaccurate my assumptions about myself can be.
You spend years thinking you’re becoming something, only to realize you’re mostly unlearning things. Unlearning who you thought you had to be. And because all of this happens so slowly, you barely notice it. But you end up loving who you’ve finally become.
Before all the nostalgia, and “best sem of our college” propaganda people become deeply committed to around eighth sem, first year was mostly just hard. Everyone around me seemed functional in this terrifyingly convincing way while I was still overwhelmed by almost everything. I didn’t think I would make it through college sometimes.
Thankfully, I had the greatest Amma.
I genuinely think half my survival strategy at IITK was just calling her at the right time. Somehow, after every conversation, everything felt manageable again. Learnt my lesson: everything becomes significantly less terrifying when you stop trying to do it alone and reach out instead. In fact, I think I’ve been really, really lucky when it comes to people.
In hindsight, my college journey was shaped as much by the things I almost didn’t choose as the things I did. The people I almost didn’t meet. The conversations I almost didn’t have. The opportunities I almost didn’t apply for. Somewhere along the way, the people around me taught me a lesson I had spent years getting wrong.I used to believe confidence came first and then you tried things.
But it was demonstrated to me that the actual process is much ruder than that.
Fun little context.
I chose dance as my CPA, it felt like the only thing I could choose to be honest. I wanted to swim, but how could I pick it when I could barely stay afloat.
But somehow, in the strange accidental way life rearranges itself for you, the dance team forgot to put my name on the final list after trials. And when I heard about it, I felt something deeply unexpected :
relief.
A few days later I found myself sitting in front of Vadi Sir (my swim coach) while he looked at me with this almost offended confusion and asked me why the hell is my name missing from all lists in existence. I don’t know what came over me then, maybe guilt, but I told him I wanted swimming. And somehow, miraculously, he told me he had only one spot left in Aquatics and he let me in, just like that.
So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, through a combination of luck, timing, and what I can only assume was a temporary lapse in judgment on his part, I became a member of the swim CPA gang. Despite possessing the aquatic instincts of a brick.
The pool humbles you quickly, though. I could barely swim ten metres.
I started showing up everyday but it didn’t seem to be helping. I didn’t know how to breathe while swimming without feeling like I was actively drowning.
And then, I met Rachita, the Institute Blues herself.
I genuinely think some people arrive in your life at the exact moment when you need them the most.
Because she just quietly decided to teach me. Watching her made it difficult to be discouraged and suddenly, being terrible at something felt oddly motivating.
and that’s how I learned all four strokes. She taught me how to fly, but more than the strokes, she taught me how to breathe. Which sounds small until you realize how impossible swimming becomes when you’re terrified of letting go long enough to inhale.
What I found in Aquatics wasn’t just a sport. The pool became one of those rare places on campus where showing up felt effortless and where I found the teammates that turned even the most exhausting practices into something I looked forward to. It gave me something I didn’t know I was looking for, a home away from home.
I think that’s what I’ll carry with me most from IITK in the end.
The people who stayed when life got hard. The risks that worked out. The ones that didn’t. The conversations that changed my mind. The nights that felt endless. The mornings that arrived anyway. The places that slowly started feeling like home.
It’s so easy to connect the dots now.
Perhaps growing up is nothing more than learning to trust that the dots are becoming a picture long before you can see it. That meaning exists even when it feels hidden. That the detours, mistakes, coincidences, and moments of complete absurdity are not interruptions to the story, but part of it.
The Dots That Made the Picture
(Please mentally insert the Deewangi Track from Om Shanti Om here.)
The Residents of C223
Somehow, a room designed for one person ended up housing three. I still don’t know when exactly my room stopped being my room and became our room. Techkriti wala mattress on the floor, our yap session achieving flow state and it would be 5am in the morning. I’ll miss the late night cooking sessions, the pancakes and soups that somehow tasted better at 3 a.m., and the endsem nights where we took turns keeping each other awake when all three of us were running purely on caffeine and delusion. I will miss having my room constantly occupied, the endless conversations, and the comfort of always having someone around.
PS: What I will not miss, however, is your Titanium alarm, Riya. That alarm ringtone qualifies as a human rights violation.
G-Top (Also Known as the Aquatics Team)
They really do know how to party.
Some of my happiest memories from IITK happened in and around that pool. I will miss the ridiculously large post-practice dinners and the spontaneous outings. It’s going to be so strange swimming without having the comfort of the team being around.
Aerial Robotics
I came for the drones. I left with friends, memories, and a much healthier respect for expensive electronics.
Some of my favorite memories were the countless evenings in H2 trying to figure out why something wasn’t working. We’d sit there for hours debugging, soldering, arguing over what the problem could be, and somehow spending more time yapping than actually fixing anything. All the while, the mosquitoes would be absolutely relentless, treating us like an all-you-can-eat buffet.
And all the people who turned my ordinary days into stories
Be it all the wild memories from our trip to Goa or Varkala, the drunk nights we barely remember and somehow never forgot, the walks that lasted longer than intended, or the countless moments that seemed ordinary until they became memories.
The people who taught me that academics are easier when someone is ranting through them with you, when “kyu ni hori padhai?” becomes less of a complaint and more of a shared language. The people with whom I discovered that a ten-page research paper can, in fact, be written in under two hours, provided you have enough caffeine, delusion, and ChatGPT Premium. The ones who sat with me and held me through the chaos of placement season, when every rejection felt personal and every uncertainty felt permanent.
And just like that, the chapter closes.
Maybe I was destined to be where I am right now, or maybe it was all a miracle that I managed to meet the people I did, knowing how many obstacles might have gotten in the way. Or maybe it’s none of that, nothing personal, maybe it was all just a coincidence. You never know.
In geometry, a tangent is the point at which a line just touches a curve. For a brief moment, they share precisely the same angle, before separating again and carrying on. I’ve come to think that many of the most important people in our lives arrive this way, not to stay forever, but to leave us changed.
Whether it was fate, luck, or pure coincidence no longer seems to matter.
What matters is that, for a little while, our stories occupied the same page.
Thank you, IITK.
Written by : Anushka Singh
Edited by : Aditi Kesari, Akash Baudh
