As We Leave #16: It’s not supposed to be perfect. It’s just supposed to be ‘YOU’.

Vipul Bajaj is a Y16 graduating student with a double major in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Engineering. He talks about his journey and his choices at IITK.

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.

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After postponing for the umpteenth time for different reasons, I finally sat down writing my ‘As we leave’. It couldn’t be more difficult reminiscing the last five years of my life amid a raging pandemic. Yet, I always wanted to write one to allow myself to revisit one of the best phases of my life, which led to a boy’s metamorphosis into a man.

It couldn’t be stressed enough how much this pandemic hurt me and many of the final year plans I had in place for my IITK journey. I wish none of the future batches has to miss the last Dance Extravaganza, the  Farewell, the cult photoshoots, a Physical Convocation and a Goodbye.

While going down memory lane, I realised that the period following March 2020 is surprisingly faint in my memory. So I guess this writing would mostly be limited to my in-campus experiences of around four years.

Luckily though, my final month at IITK was my most eventful time. Maybe the divine knew that things are going to turn haywire soon. A fantastic Holi celebration, once in a while Hall-1 ki Baraat, winning Hall 2’s phatta league, Mafia nights, endless partying in restaurants in Kanpur and capping it off with a successful Goa Tour. I seriously have no idea how I got so carelessly drawn in all these guilty pleasures, having held myself for most of the four years. And I cannot stress how happy I’m to have lived my life to the fullest towards the end.

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But this is not how it all started. Instead, due to some random sequence of successive choices in life, I had landed here. Right from the day I stepped into this campus, the aura engulfed me.

Honestly, after giving up a lot of freedom and pleasure while preparing for JEE, I was revitalised and wanted to enjoy this moment to the fullest, I was still under the impression of what my coaching teachers said to us, ‘Ek baar bas IIT karlo, fir toh life set hai’.

But reality soon struck hard. I had to make peace with the fact that it’s not all fun and had to cope with the quizzes that were bombarded much sooner than I would have liked. Having been trained in the JEE setup where you just cannot tolerate being behind others, hard work came impulsively to me to ace yet another rat race.

The IITK culture was initially something that I did not take seriously. Still, I realised how it had carefully evolved itself to create a lasting connection with this place and its people. Witless cheering for your hall, the give it all spirit in inter hall competitions, all culminating at the steps of OAT, seems surreal now.

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With all my ‘enthu’ and HEC’s encouragement, I went on to try my hands at every other thing humanly possible to manage concurrently. From ELS to HSS to Dramatics to Robotics to Electronics to SAE to Aeromodelling to every other sport I could spell, I was there for my hall. Insane hall patriotism, you would feel. Queerly, it followed a gaussian curve. It came crashing down as high and quick as it went up. By the end of the second year, I realised I wouldn’t be able to manage studies and multiple activities simultaneously and ended up prioritising the former. Initially, I had jumped with excitement seeing so many events happening here that too for free—a plethora of talks, workshops, and what not. I contemplated attending them all. How foolish it all seems now.

My journey through the years here at the outset would look like of a typical decent CPI guy eternally confused between academia and job. I joined IITK Mechanical Engg only to change it to Electrical a year later and then doubled it up with a major in CSE. However, the only deserving A*’s I had until my last semester were in Chemistry and Biology courses, making me question my engineering choices. The first year ended with heartbreak, with me missing “Double Dassa” by the barest of margins, 0.06% to be exact in one of the ‘hated’ MTH courses. Trying to move on, I delved into extracurricular stuff. Always fascinated by cars, I got associated with SAE initially. It was a great learning experience. My second year went with another phase of exploring non-academic activities. I had a stint at BloodConnect, an Academic mentor at Counselling Service, CFO at Electrical Engineering Association and an all-rounder in the IITK Cricket team. Meanwhile, funnily, I was rejected by Vox twice. Yet, I’m here writing an article for them. Alongside, I had a pretty successful pitching of a product that grew out of a Microsoft Code.Fun.Do hackathon. Then come the second year summers where I accidentally ended up doing a research internship. After that, I spent time researching ML, waking & sleeping in Delta Lab throughout my senior sophomore year. This dented my CPI a bit but enabled me to sojourn globally. Hesitatingly, I participated in another hackathon by Deloitte, which would turn out to be one of my most unplanned successful expeditions ever. Cometh the fourth year, we got boxed into small single rooms of Hall-1, the wings got broken, and we got an indication that this honeymoon phase will not last forever, and we needed to get our acts together pretty soon.

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I can now vouch that IITK gives you enough opportunities to achieve whatever you want in any walk of life. But, simultaneously, it time and again gives you humbling experiences. When you realise that anything you thought you were great at, there is another predestined guy there, that too in your wing ever so often, who does that same thing many times better than you. It may be studies or cricket trivia or quizzing or TT or socialising or whatnot. This realisation is sometimes scary, degrades your morale, and you end up thinking you were nothing but a frog in the well thus far. But one should, on the contrary, use this as an excellent learning opportunity and use it as one of the many steps for reaching the pinnacle in any domain.

The first year went without much of a hassle where the department had not yet kicked in, and we weren’t expected to have a crystal clear future. But entering the second year, compelled onto thinking for internships and projects, it all came crashing and laid bare my Achilles heel – quick decision making. It escalated very quickly from what internships to do to what to do in life. I had no idea. Looking for answers, I wandered from door to door of various ‘supposedly‘ successful seniors. I tried to understand their thought process, which may lead me out of this messy situation that I encounter often and settle this matter once and for all. Soon I realised that most of my immediate seniors were as clueless as I was. Above that, whenever I went to people for advice, it appeared that people had vindicated their decisions in their minds with justifications to even decisions which they had to take on account of helplessness back then and have lost a neutral judgement on the subject now and this led me to a more profound realisation.

At this point, I went onto a deeper question. I had endless philosophical discussions with my roommate on the meaning of life all night and ended up missing morning classes umpteen times. I desperately wished there to be a book or a manual on living a life, too, because even Google couldn’t help me out with a definite answer on this.

With all the turmoil happening around, I realised just how random things could be when I landed an internship. I applied for some 50 companies, sat for some 20 tests, gave interviews for 5-6 with totally different profiles and got selected in one where I wasn’t even shortlisted in the first place. And supposedly, this was going to decide the trajectory of my life. I mean seriously, almost no one lands an intern or a job offer consciously in this process. Is our life trajectory so out of our control? Then why am I even fussing about it so much? And how do I now decide whether to continue with this or try something else, not even having the first-hand experience of the paths I left in the previous junction? It will haunt you in the middle of the night. It sucks to watch your friends sorting out their dreams while you are too confused even to have one.

I had sometime back read about the Buridan’s ass paradox. He famously argues that

Save for ignorance or impediment, a human faced by alternative courses of action must always choose the greater good. Should two courses be judged equal, then the will cannot break the deadlock; all it can do is suspend judgment until the circumstances change, and the right course of action is clear.

Funnily, I’ve always been a victim of this paradox and have been unable to break the deadlock and keep on suspending my judgement for as late as possible. It all started with me taking both Maths and Biology in Class 11th, then me opting for two coaching institutes. Then finally, I did a double major in two engineering streams that were both different from the one I took admission into. Even while JEE counselling, I was dumbstruck in deciding between Bombay Chemical and Kanpur Mechanical and endless more decisions. This time I couldn’t ride both the boats and hence had to choose one among the equally good options deemed then. Though, looking back, I couldn’t have been more proud of that decision five years ago. But I still didn’t know what the purpose of life is? I thought that I might not be wise enough to take this decision at this moment in life, and things would be more apparent as I grow older.

“You think when you reach a certain age, things will start making sense. But, then, you find out you’re just as lost as you were before.”

Then I stumbled across a piece of wisdom by a sane senior and have been deeply impacted by it ever since.

The insight I gained from it was that this confusion that I had was not only limited to me but also universal, and it’s not something that can be termed a current generation issue. It transcends time. The most pragmatic solution to this fix is to choose one of the many directions that you deem good enough, and you would be better off than just thinking about which path to choose. And numerous examples lay the proof that if I just had the strength of will, even if I realise years later that something was off, even with all the responsibilities, it was almost with total certainty that I could act to change where I was and what I was. It takes time to digest this, but it frees you from the paralysis that decision-making often rendered me into when fully internalised.

“Kyun banun main kisi aur ki tarah, zamaane mein jab koi mujhsa nahi.”

Nothing in this world is binary. Everything lies in a spectrum from one extreme to another. So, we need not always make the best decision among the million decisions we need to make in life. If we end up taking good enough decisions most of the time, we will end up in a pretty good place in life. Most of the decisions don’t even matter in the long run, which we fret so much about daily. And we can always switch things in life until we’re alive.

“Some say that we only live once. Wrong! We only die once. We live every day!”

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Whenever you feel down, or things do not seem to be going well, or you failed an exam, just think, will this even matter ten years down the line, and you’ll soon realise how big you had made a small thing in life to.

I’m a firm believer of Steve Jobs’s quote – “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. ” So here is what I would tell a fresher me –

Get yourself moving, build things, explore everything and eventually carve your niche.

It’s all about the memories that we make here. Nothing else’s going to stay with us.

Which courses do you take? Which clubs do you join? How much CPI do you get? How do you get it? Which companies to sit for? Which sports to choose for CPA? The specifics of any of these won’t matter, but the resultant effort would compound into a net fruitful result. But once you get out, I can guarantee that you’ll rue the fact that life’s so dull after college and why I didn’t do this or that, and you would never be saying why I did this or that?

So, do random stuff and discover your inner self as this is the last time you’ll be enjoying life without the realisation of the merciless society outside, where the baggage of expectations and responsibilities will drown you.

“Our biggest regrets are not for the things we have done but for the things we haven’t done.”

Chad Michael Murray

Ultimately it’s not the specifics of your decisions that impact the final you that comes out of this place; it will be the net sum of all the myriad of experiences and endeavours you take in this journey. Therefore, I believe anything you do here other than doing nothing contributes to the end product you become.

I realised that one quality that would inevitably help you in your stay at IITK would be to say more yes than no to random things. Just think about what could be the worst scenario if you did this and make yourself comfortable with it and if there’s not much loss in going for a task, don’t hesitate and at least give it a try. This confusion may be in numerous events, whether it’s about asking out someone, standing in an election, or applying for a seemingly tough scholarship/internship. Just go for it. Don’t hesitate to do anything. If there isn’t much downside to doing/attempting something, go for it! This applies to anything and everything in life and to the decisions that you need to make at every step in life. And even if you fail, remember that “Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.”

Trust me on this, I have an adaptation from interstellar to remind you –

“Do You Want To Take A Leap Of Faith Or Become A Man Filled With Regret Waiting To Graduate Unchanged?”

If only someone had let us know the last days we spent at IITK was the last time we’d ever spend there, perhaps we would have lived our final few moments trying to conclude this journey.

“Goodbyes make you think. They make you realise what you’ve had, what you’ve lost, and what you’ve taken for granted.”

Ritu Ghatourey

It seems college was meant to teach us a lot about life, accepting that sometimes there won’t be closure, and we need to learn to live with it. We’ll never forget, though, that we couldn’t say a final goodbye, but that’s how life is maybe, and we learned it the hard way.

In the end, ‘Bakchod’, chaapu, kholna, GPL, ‘Chill hai’ won’t be mere terms; they will be emotions entrenched in your heart, and your ears will be yearning to hear them once again.

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I would try to end this piece with a short feeble attempt at poetry.

Funny it is, being wanderers from far away lands,
We somehow landed here at IITK!
Not just mere serendipity,
But in a divinely programmed way

We ran for life on the airstrip to get a lift,
Presumably required to get a “Dassa” initially.
However funny it may sound now,
We followed everything our seniors told religiously.

My randomly allocated “Bakait” hostel became my identity,
And my wing, my lifeline, obliviously.
Deciphering the DoSAs, the DoAAs, and the DoPAs
I fell in love with the culture here eventually.

Couldn’t fathom half of the courses we did here at IITK,
Which could supposedly be aced only with all-nighters at the library.
Switching from Yantrik Abhiyantriki to Batti and Dabba,
I tirelessly raced across KD, RM, CC, NCL and LHC
Bruised and hurt, landing up exhausted at HC

From battling Fourier Transforms to enjoying Antaragni nights,
We endured, we fought, we won, and faltered again as a see-saw!
And finally cherished and thought nothing could go wrong,
But in the end, a ‘Chinese’ bat ascertained the Murphy’s law!

The memories will be etched in my heart forever. I never thought the end would be so emotional. You know it’s love when you have been saying goodbye for this many times, but still, you’re not ready to leave even in your ‘As we leave’.

“Yaadein mithai ke dabbe ki tarah hoti hai. Ek baar khula toh sirf ek tukda nahi kha paoge.”

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Written by: Vipul Bajaj

Edited by: Tulika Shukla, Aryan Pandeya