Anivesh Sahu is a Y16 dual degree student from the Department of Aerospace Engineering. He talks about his journey of self-discovery after coming to 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.
Nostalgia, thou truly are a duplicitous bitch!
Nostalgia is a powerful force but a deceptive one. In the maelstrom of the moment, we often tend to reminisce about the “good old days”, in the process of which we shroud our sufferings and lock them in our past. If I’d have written this piece the previous year, I would indeed be brimming with hope and would definitely be talking about the so-called “good old days” of college. But having been back on the campus, albeit for merely two months, that rosy picture of the past has been unseated to give way to a more realistic understanding of my time at IITK.
I don’t think that the readership of this column would be a least bit interested in learning about the cliched details of my campus life (i.e., projects, PORs, interns, and placement) than they would be interested in knowing who Klemens von Metternich was. (That story is bland and uninteresting). So, if I have to impress upon the readers a sincere narration of my time at IITK, I must start from the beginning.
Before I start yapping about myself, I’d like you to construct a mental picture. A picture of a distorted, irregular form (say, the ill-formed clay used in pottery). This represents our personality when we are born. Growing up, it rests on our parents to nurture and construct our characters to the best of their understanding. This is where the issue arises. In most middle-class families, the parents look outwards towards society to model their child’s dreams and aspirations. They sculpt our personalities keeping in mind what society thinks is worthy, leading to a very parochial understanding of success and failure in the child’s mind. For him getting a good score is good, and wasting time on video games is bad. During this period of our lives, the scope of our free will seems to be very limited since, until this age, we undergo an aggressive socialisation process. During this period, we can be nothing but what society turns us into. I, too, grew up with this provincial understanding of life.
Individual identity is a very crucial thing. It tethers us to a very realistic understanding of our self-worth, and it defines who we are. In those initial years, I only had my academics with me on the identity front. My sole authority for self-worth and self-confidence was that I was good at academics in school. It is in my first semester when this bubble burst, when I was robbed of this pride leaving a very soul-crushing void in my identity. I realised that, despite my mother’s confidence, I was not good at academics. There were individuals who were far better than me, not only in academics but in every other aspect. If life was indeed a rat race, I wasn’t even on the ground, and these guys were already at the finish line. I was confronted with a difficult truth. The truth that I am worth nothing. I wasn’t skilled in academics, I couldn’t play a musical instrument, I don’t have any hobbies, I haven’t read novels, I wasn’t good in sports, and many more such flaws were suddenly staring me down the barrel. I suffered from an identity crisis.
Making matters worse was crippling anxiety that I don’t deserve to be here. I am not sure whether many people experience this, but being granted admission on an affirmative action program planted a seed of self-doubt in my psyche. A seed that resulted in me questioning my worth. While growing up, the society indoctrinated me to believe in a lie that people availing the affirmative action program are lazy freeloaders who don’t carry merit and are afraid of competition. I was so conditioned to believe this lie that I felt guilty of my existence. My mental state was so self-deprecating that I once remarked to a friend, “Yaar General rank se aana chahiye tha, aise aana cheating lag raha hai”. It took me some time to unlearn this lie of merit, a lie which I carried with me for most of my life. This lie led me to question my existence, my worth and even my presence on the campus. It took some effort and reading to come to an understanding that “Affirmative Action is not a poverty alleviation program” “In principle, affirmative action is an instrument for identifying merit in individuals in historically marginalised communities” “And more importantly, affirmative action is about social justice”1. My anxiety from imposter syndrome left me only when I questioned my belief system and opened my mind to a broader understanding of things. Now, having been on this roller coaster ride of self-discovery, I can indeed assert myself with confidence and can say without getting all revengy that “I got what I deserved!”.
Earlier, I mentioned that our personalities and understanding of the world is mirrored by our parents to the wants and needs of society. While this has the downside of robbing us of our free agency to act on the plethora of choices offered by life. But there’s an upside too. Not exactly a positive aspect, but an aspect worth discovering. After being closeted with a unipolar view, the college life, especially at IITK, offers us an opportunity to appreciate, understand and celebrate the sheer complexity of this multipolar world. It pushes us to embrace new ideas, new ideals, and a new trajectory for our lives. It empowers us to cast, shape and model our personality to the best of our understanding. For the first time in our lives, we are now in the driving seat. The choices are ours, and so is the responsibility. We are now the flagbearers of our personality. We can now pick and choose how we wanna shape ourselves. We can re-discover and re-invent ourselves to our likings. Though all this new responsibility is scary at first, but I believe that’s how we truly grow; that’s how we evolve towards our better self. And we keep doing this all through our lives.
It took me some time to formulate this understanding, and I tried to reflect this understanding in the choices I made at IITK. While the academic front continued at its ordinary course of mediocrity, I wanted to diversify myself. And sorry, I didn’t join clubs or projects. I ventured into the unexplored field (by me) of liberal arts. I found my calling in law. And no, I am not quitting engineering to be a lawyer; it’s just that I enjoy reading about legal discourse. I am enchanted by the legal realism of Oliver Wendell Holmes, by the empowering spirit of RBG, by the courageous defiance of H.R. Khanna, by the landmark judgements of D.Y. Chandrachud and by many more great individuals who have made a difference in this world. (Here, I would apologise to all those who bore the brunt of my boring sermons regarding the law. I’m genuinely sorry you had to take that.) While the law had its unique place in my college experience, I also discovered, admittedly for the first time in my life, the world of novels. Because of them, I was going places. I explored London with Jeffrey Archer, Kerala with Arundhati Roy, Dublin with James Joyce, NYC with J.D. Salinger, Florence & Rome with Dan Brown, and Hogwarts with J.K. Rowling. I mention this not to brag, but to introduce the readers to these great authors like they were introduced to me by my few well-intentioned seniors. I found in these authors some excellent tour guides; I hope you do too.
Well, this is how I spent my time. With books and my uncharted mind. I also had the opportunity to be acquainted with and built strong bonds with some of the best individuals on campus. They, despite their shortcomings, added meaning to the campus life and made it worth living. If it weren’t for them, all of us wouldn’t have survived the existential brouhaha of campus life. Kudos to all of them!
I don’t know how to end this. I have no lesson for you, as my journey too, has just begun. You can pick and choose if anything’s relevant to you. Otherwise, you just wasted a few minutes reading some bloke blathering about random stuff. I think ending with Faiz is very appropriate since he’s kind of our campus icon, and I have just the couplet to capture his existentialist angst.
ज़िन्दगी क्या किसी मुफ़लिस की क़बा है जिस में
हर घड़ी दर्द के पैवन्द लगे जाते हैं
Written by- Anivesh Sahu
Edited by- Ahmad Amaan, Abhimanyu Sethia
Footnotes
- See Horizontal Reservations and the Persistence of the Myth of Merit (last accessed on 11 June 2021). Available at: https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2020/12/22/horizontal-reservations-and-the-persistence-of-the-myth-of-merit/
For a more deconstructed idea of merit see Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, Penguin Books Limited (2020)
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