As We Leave…#10

Yash Mahajan is a final year undergraduate in Computer Science and Engineering department. Let’s have a look at his journey at IIT Kanpur and live the nostalgia and reminiscence with him.

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 IIT K. 

NOTE: The author has a tendency to often exaggerate and overstate things, so things may not be as extreme in real life as they have been mentioned here.

I procrastinated writing this for a long time hoping that I would get the motivation back when I would return to the campus. I figured that the feeling of nostalgia during the last few days on campus would hit me and help me in penning down thoughts about my stay at IIT-K. I was still trying to look on the bright side, but as time went on and the future became more apparent, it dawned on me that we had all left without realising it and it was painful to accept it. I wondered the reason behind the feelings of numbness, void and emptiness I was experiencing because unlike many others (but like many other people?) my stay hasn’t been entirely pleasant or nice. Life wasn’t as sunny and hopeful as I had expected, or maybe it wasn’t just for me. 

It was hard to find a reason behind my newfound love for IIT-K, sure I had some good times, but whenever I looked back at my campus life so far before now, it was also mixed with dark, depressing and lonely moments. So, I tried to introspect about why my college life wasn’t what I had hoped for it to be before coming here, and why I was a lonely, unhappy, stressed and anxious wreck for a majority of my stay here. People usually view their experiences in a positive light in hindsight, or they try to, but that wasn’t easy for me to do. So, I decided to go through my past 4 years from the beginning to the abrupt end to understand it better.

And it is what I decided I wanted to write about. My personal experiences/story is really routine and remarkably ordinary. Because let’s be honest a story about a slightly introverted CSE guy with very few extracurricular activities ending up with a “coding” job at the end of his degree is not really exciting or anything new. I thought it would be much better to instead express what I felt over these last couple of years.

I came here with some dreams and aspirations as well as expectations from what I wanted in the future. I wanted to excel, and I had built up an image of how I wanted my life to go on ahead, but well, the image got shattered pretty quickly. As it turns out not a single one of them panned out the way I wanted them to. It is disappointing, and I wasn’t accustomed to this feeling of failure. I had no idea how to deal with the situation. I tried staying in denial and ignoring the disappointment, which only aggravated the situation. Instead of trying to think about what I could do with the cards I was dealt, I instead pretended that the problems didn’t exist which made it much harder when eventually, the time to face the problem came.

I would also often find myself feeling alone, unable to fit in, and not being able to relate with anyone else. There have been many many days on campus where I have had a very strange feeling of living alone in a sea of strangers. This loneliness has been a constant throughout a large part of my stay here, and it’s difficult to focus or do anything productive at those times. It’s challenging to get out of bed, go to classes, or tick off the endless list of to-dos in the campus environment. And I often wondered why it was happening to me or was I alone in that state. My interaction with other people also reduced to null, and I avoided talking to my friends as much as I could. I could, however, always manage to complete my academic tasks and other deadlines, so my academics, as well as some other things, remained consistently good, but that’s about it. Every other aspect of life would get adversely affected and in some cases, irreversibly. I wouldn’t feel okay, but contrary to common portrayals that didn’t imply that I would start screwing up at everything.  

There is also the fact the environment is competitive, in most aspects. Even if you try to not pay attention to or compare yourself to others, the nature of internships, placements, etc. is competitive by design, and it brings on a lot of stress regarding the future. Things don’t always go along your way, you get overwhelmed, and it’s challenging to deal with the situation at times, which may lead to a nervous breakdown. I often got very flustered because of the stress, and handing it all alone was a harrowing experience. Life isn’t as binary as it is in the JEE and school days, and the anxiety and the uncertainties regarding what lies ahead are scary. People have different cope-up mechanisms to handle the situation, some people deal with it very calmly, I didn’t, and so the built-up stress would often blow up. I didn’t anticipate that the stress might be more than what it was in the JEE days because I was very naive, the fact that the stress never actually goes away also led to some resentment.

A large part of the stress although was my fault, I worried too much about the future, and always assumed that the worst-case scenario would be the most likely one, I would think about imaginary scenarios about the future and get worked up about my lack of possible options. This negativity was very toxic, which I realised much later, and had severe consequences on my well-being. 

Now, everyone has bad days or bad weeks that are hard to go through or at least most do. The problem is when the weeks stretch into months and every day seems miserable with no glimmer of hope that things might get better in future. These rough patches were frequent for me, and usually, I couldn’t figure out the reason why I felt that way. From an outsider’s perspective, my life didn’t seem that bad or miserable. I wouldn’t be in a bad position after graduation by any means, nor was I entirely unproductive for a majority of the time. But with time I have realised that maybe it was mostly because I felt bad that my life wasn’t going the way I wanted it to, and because I kept everything bottled up inside of me. 

You might say that I am being biased and just focusing on only what didn’t fit in with my picture-perfect dream of college life. I can’t really disagree with that statement. Indeed, my expectations weren’t fulfilled, and my stay was a lot more isolated than what I wanted.  Nevertheless, It would be a lie if I say that there weren’t days which were beautiful and fun, or that there weren’t any highs in this time. Like the many negative periods, there were also lovely, enjoyable phases wherein I was happy, content and satisfied with my current situation and hopeful for what lay onwards. But if I try to calculate the overall score, assigning a positive score to the good memories and negative to the bad ones, the score is way more negative than I had hoped for. So I have deliberately made a choice to just focus on the dark parts instead. 

It’s true that I miss the place, and some people, and I could have very easily written a post filled with campus references and cliches, and layout my journey with details throughout these 4 years mentioning several highs and lows and end on a positive bittersweet note. But I just think that would be me being very dishonest. It would just be nostalgia making me only remember the good times when I am finally leaving and moving on from IIT-K. So thus, there is no happy ending or a twist about how I changed things through or any description of how I have changed a lot from the time I entered the campus. This just isn’t how life actually goes for most people. Frankly, I haven’t changed much throughout these 4 years, my personality is the same as what it was around 4 years back in my perspective, and I am leaving this place with a lot of regrets. Sure I learned a lot but was it an experience of a lifetime which I would always remember fondly, as I see right now, maybe not. You might also be finding this end rather abrupt and disappointing. I, on the other hand, think this ending is weirdly fitting for my journey at IIT-K, I didn’t get the ending or closure that I wanted and maybe you the reader shouldn’t either.

Written by:- Yash Mahajan.

Edited by:- Shiven Tripathi.