Siddhant Thakur is a final year undergraduate in the BSBE 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.
Four years, four phases, four-twenties, a million memories, and a Fourier transformation. From a kid with a pipe dream to an adult with different pipe dreams.
As I leave IITK, I am not sure if I am going soon. Don’t get me wrong, I am not particularly in love with this place. What I am in love with, though, are the people I came across at IITK. I love the friends I made, the girlfriend I found, and the seniors who considered me worth their time when they ‘interacted’ with me. It all started on the day I got Physics at IITK. As a teenager, I wanted to be a physicist, the good old aforementioned pipe dream. Slowly, this place got me to my senses, as I got high in the spirit of my friends’ companionship and that of living while I’m young.
IITK tried to teach me everything from Mathematics to Responsibility. What I learned here, however, was the one thing of utmost importance: Life. Spoiler Alert: The moral of my story is going to be, “It’s okay to not be okay.” I have walked out in the middle of more end-sems than I have sat through. With that fact in mind, let’s begin with the phases.
PHASE 1 – Interaction and Depression
It came on the day I first set foot onto the grounds of this place, and would forever change my life and perspective of it. The simultaneous occurrence might suggest a cause-effect relationship. To that, I just want to say, No. Attempting to justify ‘interaction’ has always proven rather futile in my experience. I have seen the campus transform in many ways, and I leave that to my peers’ ‘As We Leaves’. Little did I know what awaited me. If you’re a fresher, believe me, you probably don’t know what the hell you are doing here and what will eventually become of you. Have faith and plod on. If you are expecting me to elaborate on why I was depressed, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I really don’t know. If you are struggling with depression today and fail to find a reason, don’t worry, there doesn’t always have to be one.
My first happy day at IITK was Freshers’ Night ’16. I was one of the six anchors chosen for the sole reason that I was an ‘entertaining character,’ as so casually stated by one of my favorite seniors, ‘Pandu’ [Shashank Bhandari (Y12)], a gem of a man. Back in the day, he was a fifth-year who unknowingly helped me cope with my depression throughout my first semester. While leaving, he said, “Thakur, padh lena please.” I sure as hell didn’t take his parting advice. I just couldn’t. After he left, I found solace in poetry, thanks to ELS that gave me a platform for my first, a rather rudimentary attempt at it. I came in as an entertaining character and stayed on as an occasional poet. After scoring 0 in all my quizzes, my second semester’s end was marked by my sleeping through my PHY103 end-sem. How I passed will always stay a mystery. I want to reiterate that I was in the physics department and wanted to be a physicist. It’s funny how you spend all your life making plans, and then you hear god laughing.
PHASE 2 – Letting Go
By the end of my first year, I had understood that staying in physics might as well be the end of me. One of the hardest things is to accept that one will have to give up on their childhood dream. Depression intensified as I sailed through my third semester, failing for the first time in the end. Once again, I had happily and ever so loudly snored through my PHY224 (Optics) end-sem in L2. The tutor woke me up, to whom I submitted a blank answer script and walked out of the exam. Another of my closest seniors suggested, “you should come to BSBE bro; you won’t survive in the physics department.” This time I decided to take my senior’s advice at the end of my 3rd semester, only to run away from my misery.
“One of the hallmark moments in life is when you find the courage to let go of what you can’t change.” I could see my 16-year-old self extremely disappointed in me. I wrote a poem about it as well, this time to no avail. Yet another one of my seniors in the physics department once said to me, “if dreams didn’t change, everyone would either be a pirate or a princess.”
Now, as a BSBE Undergrad, my fourth semester began. In the same stride of giving up on my dream, I gave up on life. I was awake but not alive. I isolated myself, socially, emotionally, academically, and in every other way imaginable. With 56 credits registered, I didn’t appear for even a single lecture/quiz/midsem/presentation/assignment. The one or two I did appear for, I don’t recall. My entire fourth semester seems like a dark dream today. The only two reasons I appeared for the end-sems were my friends Shubham Gaur and Siddhant Raj, and the fear of getting terminated.
PHASE 3 – Rock Bottom
The semester had ended, and with that, I had decided to end my social isolation. As expected, while I was out of campus partying with my friends, all our phones beeped. The fourth-semester results had arrived. After a few shots, and bracing myself for impact, I took my phone out and read my result aloud in a brief line: “F, F, F, F, F, F.” My whole world came crashing down. This was followed by a dramatic deafening silence. I didn’t have to calculate my SPI this time. It was a rather straightforward 0.0.
The night that followed was, of course, a blackout. The next afternoon when I woke up on the floor of my room on the ground floor of Hall 12, with my head heavy as a rock, I quite literally felt the rock-bottom I had hit. Following that, I received two emails. One was jointly from the HOD and DUGC Convener of BSBE, asking me to meet them. The second from DoAA, stating I had been placed on Warning. The latter, honestly, was a relief. I had expected worse. With that, I had survived the first half of my Life at IITK.
PHASE 4 – Coming Back to Life [Pink Floyd]
In the semester that followed, I found my true calling. In retrospect, all I went through was because I was not on the path I should have been on, and I had been right in the middle of it to see the entire picture. I had been up all night before the first day of the fifth semester (like almost all other nights at IITK). I dragged myself to the first class of the semester, “Molecular Cell Biology.” The course introduced me to the molecular basis of life. It immediately appealed to me like nothing else had in the past 2 years. I went to the following few classes and fell in love with it. Once I started studying Molecular Biology out of sheer interest, the other courses followed naturally. I was thoroughly enjoying myself.
I stopped attending classes once again after the Mid-Sems, but I didn’t stop keeping up with my quizzes and assignments. After all, I realized attending classes took the discipline I simply didn’t have; and I still don’t. Molecular Biology went on to become my new dream. The end of the semester was marked by an SPI of 8.0 and me topping the end-sem of the course I had recently become so fond of. Since then, I have spent the following semesters exploring my love for biology, which has only grown with each passing day. In my experience, an 8.0 was relatively easy. All it took to do well in an exam was finishing the syllabus. All it took to complete the syllabus was one night of honest dedication before each quiz and assignment. The mid-sem and end-sem automatically followed. Give it a shot as a thumb rule. You will be pleasantly surprised by the results.
My 0.0 taught me to keep my expectations in check. I learned that in my case, getting a B in a course is a realistic expectation, getting an A is a stroke of luck, and getting a C is good enough. As I learnt this, I saw my depression vaporize. Brandon Sanderson put it beautifully in his novel, The Way of Kings[*], “Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack”.
I would like to premise this with, “don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s not worth the opportunity cost of all the potential smiles you trade away in the process. It comes down to simple cost-benefit analysis in the end”. Take your time to celebrate the little achievements that come your way. Four out of the five HSS courses I did were in Psychology. It would be unfair not to mention the immense support I received from what I learnt in every one of these courses. The Psychology courses that our college has to offer can teach you a great deal about conflict resolution.
SUMMARY
As I look back at all the night-outs and trips to Kalyanpur, Ramaiya, Sagar Dhaba, Barasirohi, Nankari, OAT, CCD, and the various rooftops, despite all the depression, darkness, isolation, and failure, it’s been one hell of a ride, and a very fruitful one at that. All the mistakes I made, all the mental pain I endured, and all the ups and downs were absolutely worth it. I made two lifelong friends along the way, Anurag Kumar (Y15) and Shubham Gaur (Y16), found a compatible companion Shivangi Gupta, and learnt the most important lesson, “everything that happens leads you to where you will be tomorrow; and it’s not going to be below rock bottom.”
I also want to use this platform provided to me by Vox Populi to say, “If you are struggling with your mental health, I am fairly easy to find. Come find me, let’s chat”. As is customary, I would like to end my story with a perfectly logical quote by Winston Churchill, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
Written by:- Siddhant Thakur
Edited by:- Hemant Kejriwal and Varun Soni
[*] Editor’s note: I was gleaming happy to see a quote from a personal favourite book!
