As We Leave… #7

Mr. Nilotpal Pathak is an undergraduate student in the Electrical Engineering Department from the Y15 batch. In a basket of love that we did weave, Here’s his journey as he leaves.

“It Occurs to him a Little Late in the Game

We Leave as Clueless as we Came”

-Father John Misty

In my final month on the campus, every little thing seemed to be engulfed in a poignant air to me – postprandial visits to the canteen just because your friends were going, long and ponderous walks between campus hotspots, the solace that you can sometimes find in studying, the idiosyncrasies of the people around you. And I found all this a little surprising.  Honestly, when I saw such sentiments expressed by seniors at least as late as the end of my 2nd year, I was skeptical if I’d accrue enough memories (read happiness?) in the latter half of my stay here to be able to wax lyrical about it all when it ended.

I had reasons for this skepticism as well. The ‘wing bonding’- such a central mainstay of my first year, was on the wane- or so it seemed to me. There were still nights where I would wake from sleep, unsure for a minute where I was, and that would really irk me. I had lost all faith in ‘IITK culture,’ convinced that its propagators mistook its immobility for perfectness*. (*Tagore)

Despite what it looked like, I was wrong to be skeptical and how glad I am about that! And I think therein lies the grotesque beauty of this place that by the end many of us are able to feel, that we did in fact, carve our niche eventually – and I don’t think this can be ascribed solely to the rose-tinted glasses we look back at our pasts through. My stay here, right from the beginning to the end, has been a humbling experience. When I first came here, that was the thing that struck me most, perhaps. And even in the very last exam I wrote, transistors and inductors seemed to laugh at me as they said ‘Whatever skills you might think you gathered here, it seems Electrical Engineering isn’t one of them.’

Well, humility is to be expected too, when there is this whole machinery to ensure that freshers ‘rid themselves of their arrogance’. But on a serious note, irrespective of what you thought you did well, you’ll meet a guy here who lives right next to you or nods to you in the mess who does exactly the same thing ten times better than you. That thing could be playing the keyboard or football or FIFA or math or making friends or a good sense of humor or movie trivia knowledge – it doesn’t matter. And that is a mortifying state of affairs until you comprehend this as a kind of learning opportunity you just discovered!

This realization and the HEC (to all of whom I am deeply grateful) led me to try out all kinds of weird stuff in my first year (stop motion animation? Athletics? Antakshari? What even..) while also doing other things I had been interested in previously too (music, football, quizzing). And just as I started wondering if it would perhaps be advisable for me to invest more time in studying, my 3rd semester provided me with an apt answer. This semester, where I undertook the smallest amount of co-curricular participation, would also become my worst semester academically. And while people have totally ruined their academics by indulging excessively in such activities too, here was indubitable proof that there was no direct relationship, one way or the other!

The second year is hard for a multitude of reasons, though, different for different people. People find out that they are not as interested in their departments as they had hoped they would be. They struggle with the fact that though it is in their best interest to know by now what they want to do, they have no clue yet. Life itself begins to seem repetitive to many here. I had to digest the simple fact then that the difference between our life here and studies earlier is more deeply rooted than I conceded previously. In our beloved coaching institutes, there would be those days soon after results when we would be encouraged to meet successes of previous years, ask them their strategy, the books they studied. It seemed to me that they all said similar if not the same things- giving you a pretty well carved out path for you to follow. Here, it seemed everyone you saw as successful prescribed to you a different set of instructions/opinions, often in direct conflict with that of others. It might work for some, and I’ll be glad for them, but it seemed to me that there are so many things you could become, that mere emulation without aligning the differences between you and your idol was bound to confound you further.

And when the intern season comes, you could really do with less confounding than more. Because I deeply felt that apart from the best of the best who have an idea by that time what they want (I hope the reader can count themselves here), all the internship season is, is a state of deep perplexion.

Where does one even begin with the intern season?

Right from the day, I went to buy those wretched formals, the whole thing had ominous vibes. That day, seeing myself in the mirror wearing a necktie- I felt a profound loss of innocence. I would only realize later how long I was to spend wearing those shoes and how much more important it was to ensure they were more comfortable than they were. Each week I would jokingly pledge to boycott products made by the companies that rejected me- Ashirvaad atta, sunbeam biscuits, cellphone processors, debit cards. By the time it all ended, the list was so long, and I was so numb that the surge of happiness most feel on landing an intern flew right by me. There was just unadulterated relief. And as research intern peeps always rub it in when I tell them this, it is perhaps harder for them. Anyway, I was to learn that a state of limbo is a terrible, terrible thing. Something to be dreaded perhaps. When you are as clueless about things as I have made myself seem in this write-up, the experience of your internship ends up confusing you more, rather than less. Landing an internship, I believe, is a very random process for most- a roll of dice rather than a conscious choice. That’s what it feels like at least.

Irrespective of how you like the one you got, how do you decide if you want to continue there or have another go at the dice? At the height of this confusion, I had the good fortune of meeting a batchmate of my father, who had come to IITK to give a talk. I found him to be a highly inspiring man, merely by the nature of his actions. I found out that after graduating with a major in Civil Engineering, he had served in the Indian Revenue Service for 14 years. Interestingly, he then decided to get a Ph.D. in Economics from the States and was now a professor. As he narrated to me the plight of convincing his advisor that he wouldn’t abandon ship after a year or two, I felt a hackneyed sense of calm course through me. What a comforting realization! Here was proof of the kind of epidemic confusion is, not just a universal constant but a temporal constant! Here lay proof that if I just had the strength of will, even if I realized a decade later that something was off, even with a wife and two kids, it was not imperceptible that I could act to change where I was and what I was.

It took time for me to internalize this, and it is a straightforward thought in theory that when confronted with confusion, becoming paralyzed by it was the worst thing you could do. If I had just acted to pull myself in any of the many directions I could head towards, I would have been better off. And I think that fuelled the near perfect penultimate semester I had, which resulted in me getting an opportunity that I am stoked about, at least for now.  

However, when one looks at the sense of stress and chaos that permeates throughout this description of four years, it is not hard to see why mental health is such a significant problem on campus today. And I would be cheating myself if I didn’t talk about that here. I was recently traveling on a bus where I saw people shoot condescending looks at a woman crying her eyes out- and I was suddenly happy for the kind of support I have been able to enjoy here. Even when my complaining must have sounded whiny to those who listened, they never let me know. For people like that, and the erasure of the skepticism I mentioned, and the opportunity to be trusted enough by unknown people for them to share their worst problems with me, I will remain deeply indebted to the Counselling Service. I sincerely hope that we will soon create an environment here where people do not gradually trundle to the edge of their wings- both literally and symbolically- and that everyone will be privy to the kind of support I feel I was lucky to receive.

Such a goal will need a contribution from everyone, but this feeling of fraternity is one aspect of our culture that I am indeed proud of, and I have a reason for hope. Recently it so happened that I found myself much more interested in talking to a friend about some problems they were having than the syllabus on the desk for the two end sems I had next day. And that wouldn’t have happened before! I climbed a barricade to check out the piano in Z-square only to be scolded by a sweeper to get out. And that wouldn’t have happened before! As I move through the ruin that was once my wing, locks on doors I never saw closed, I realized one thing. Change you; this place surely will! And that is where all the choices you take every day will culminate. It hence seems fitting to end on this alternate version of Ewan McGregor’s ‘Trainspotting’ monologue I wrote. I hope the reader can make choices with which they can feel they changed for the better after their time here. But no pressure! Because after all, there is no perfection, only life right**? (**Milan Kundera)

Choose IITK.

Choose a job.

Choose academia.

Choose a family with ‘Bhais’ and ‘Bapu’ and ‘Chachas,’

Choose fucking huge textbooks.

Choose Facebook, Counter-Strike, PUBG, Instagram, and a thousand other ways to not study.

Choose an unknown course in an unknown department in the basement of the Faculty Building.

Choose projects under professors, machine learning,

data structures, and sitting for the placements.

Choose good grades, low morale and going to the health center for stress-related problems.

Choose to rag because it happened to you.

Choose IITK culture, pornography every day, and an endless tide of depressive misogyny.

Choose to make your randomly allocated hostel a part of your identity.

Choose your friends.

Choose wearing shorts and tees for four years straight.

Choose to wear a three piece suite on an April night in a range of fucking fabrics.

Choose Dosa for breakfast and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning.

Choose to wander in the campus or performing Spirit-crushing 5 hour labs for courses you don’t want to do

All the while stuffing fucking Kathi rolls into your mouth.

Choose unfulfilled promise and wishing you’d done it all differently.

Choose never learning from your own mistakes.

Choose watching history repeat itself.

Yet choose to defy the odds and make it!

Choose to remember it all fondly,

Choose writing a memoir for Vox to help process it all.

Choose your future.

Choose IITK.

Written by Nilotpal Pathak, Edited by Ayush Agarwal