Anirudh Anil Ojha is a Y17 graduating student from the Computer Science & Engineering department. He presents an honest, unromanticised perspective of his 4 years 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
Note to reader: This article is not going to be an exposition of my resume – that is boring and reductionist. It’s not going to be anywhere close to a description of my journey, because I can never capture that in 2000 words. Batchmates and juniors can take away nostalgia and fundae respectively from this, but honestly it’s just meant to be a fun read. My opinions on my time at IITK keep on changing, but here’s what I think of it – as I leave.
Me? I tried to be the loudest to sing the hall anthem and had mailed the warden complaining about Wi-Fi removal during Galaxy, both in my first year. I had a double dassa after two semesters and had confessed to plagiarism in two courses by my seventh. I once weighed 75 kgs and once weighed 90 kgs. I was the first from my batch to clear a job interview and have cried on a phone call for failing to get a Day 1 internship. I’ve seen all passing grades, been high on every substance available on campus (and a few others) and fallen asleep in every course I’ve attended. Read on.
We love to romanticize our stories where we, the protagonist, have a complete character arc replete with struggles and an eventual victory. In this light, all our miseries and mistakes gain a sense of importance to the storyline. We overlook the sadness they caused and value the lessons they gave us, leading to the popular saying “I have no regrets”. While you may choose to look at your experiences in whichever light suits you, the fact remains that your life will suck for a good amount of time even if you make the best of decisions and especially if you don’t. I have made my fair share of mistakes and I regret them, but I can’t do anything but try to learn from them now so that’s what I’m doing. Once I overslept and got late for a lab, and was cycling too fast. My cycle collided with that of another guy and he fell down and probably hurt himself. I did not stop and help him because missing one lab of that course would mean an F. That experience still saddens me and I wish I was a more careful person, but ALAS. The moral of this story is that this college is not Hogwarts which will magically turn everything around for you. It’s an amazing place with myriad possibilities and it’s up to you to make something of that.
The best and worst thing about this place is that you can be whoever you want here. Sure, you don’t immediately deviate from the kind of person you were when you arrived. I used to refer to myself with “hum” for the entirety of my first year. But if you are unsuspecting, this place slowly starts to creep into you, changing you one choice at a time until you don’t know if you are the same person anymore, much like the proverbial ship of Theseus. This is something you will likely hear from every graduating person, and is barely something that surprises me. In fact I would have been disappointed at anything less. Hailing from a small town and a time where the internet was just starting to democratize, I was open, even eager for this place and the people I meet here to totally terraform the person I was. I feel like my life is much bigger than it was when I arrived here and that is something I am glad about.
Right, choices. In retrospect, it is amazing how the choices that mattered were the ones that I didn’t think too much about. I have spent hours analyzing what sort of internships/projects/courses to take but can’t remember one such decision that I can look back upon and say “yeah, that was so pivotal in my journey”. But decisions like entering a long distance relationship in my first semester, attaching myself to debating, filling for Antaragni Manager in my third year just because a senior from my city asked me to – these were decisions that dictated so much of how I spent my time in the upcoming years. Taking good choices comes innately to some people, and if you are part of this clique – congratulations. Most others have to rely on sheer luck. Since most of our initial decisions here are influenced by those around us, we can either a) identify amazing people to surround ourselves with b) hope that the people we run into are amazing or c) hope that the wrong decisions we make don’t come to fruition. It will be terrifying, you’ll love it.
“Why do you want your life to be easy right now?” – this is a tenet a Y12 alumnus had shared with me during a conversation, something that resonated deeply with me as it is the principle I’ve followed all of my college life. It embodies the idea that your twenties are ‘The Defining Decade’ and you should ‘make the most of them’. It is for that that I have spent a lot of my time on campus running around – from classes to the tennis court to working in teams to debating to trying to socialise etc. While I deem more chilled-out attitudes towards life equally viable – heck, even enviable at times – I have often found it incredibly frustrating how afraid people are of being ambitious over here. You see it in the mocking comments and social tagging when a person tries something that remotely strays outside the {mean + standard deviation} of their peers. The reason, I believe is, every person’s own competitiveness and the insecurity it brings along, which is making them bring collective expectations down instead of pushing themselves up. At a place where I had hoped aiming high would be the norm, it’s somehow looked at as something that you have to hide since it’s much more cool to be “chill” about life. As someone who’s the opposite of chill, I have had my share of meta-doubts about why I was stressed about things that others were lax about. It rarely made me change my original course of action, but in retrospect, I would choose to not worry about what others would think.
During my orientation, we were waiting in the auditorium and we were asked to ask random questions to the seniors standing up on the stage. Like the little bitch that I was, I remember asking “I had thought there would be cool people doing cool shit here – where are they?” I have met many such people over the years, and I must say it was NOT easy to find them. While a lot of the people who frequent the public eye are amazing, many of the best people I have met were reclusive and lazy, who would never advertise themselves and I’d have missed them if it were not for random chance or some good spotting from my side. People with the best taste in music, movies or literature, with vast knowledge on esoteric topics, and with the most sorted career plans will remain unknown if you never venture outside your wing and never initiate a fresh conversation. If there’s one advice I’d love to give you, it would be to give every person you come across a chance and look to learn from them. Some of my best memories from these four years would be the random discussions I’ve had with these people – over lunch in my mess, over code in Rajiv Motwani building, over masala Maggi in DOAA canteen, over subsidised cappuccino in CCD and over rolls (Kathi and otherwise) at way too many places. Sharing opinions and having debates on topics of no practical impact on anyone’s life remains a guilty pleasure, and BOY did we indulge.
With the online semester and everything, our interpersonal interactions have obviously taken a hit. I would not have made any new contacts in my final year were it not for the one month I spent on campus (more on that later). To every person reading, I would say that the younger you are the more excited you should be to interact with seniors who have been through the journey that you are going to have. Be shameless in pursuing conversation with whoever appeals to you, because I guarantee you that the regret of never starting a conversation is much more than that of a failed one. I’ve picked some of the best advice – from career to relationships to music – through being a pest to people and I am thankful to people who urged me to imbibe this shamelessness.
No recollection of campus is complete without mentioning the vehicle that drives these interactions, the (in)famous ‘culture’. I like to believe it is more than participation in GC events, memorising an introduction in Hindi or abiding by the ‘Golden Rules’. It is something that you breathe in from the very air around you, something that you can share only with another person from your alma mater, something that will make an alumnus from your institute respond to you out of the hundred people who may want to talk to them. The pandemic will undoubtedly leave its mark on every aspect of culture that wasn’t already eroded by changing times, but I hope that whatever replaces it is as worthy as the ones of yore. Freshers’ Inferno, Galaxy and Takneek were among the most fun times of my first year because of the people and ideas they introduced me to.
That being said, I wish the narrative around culture was healthier than we got. Your surroundings will try to make you do a lot of things – from bringing out the best in you to making you hate people for arbitrary reasons. Some are fine with melding themselves into this great force, and paint themselves with the colours of their hall/club/cell. Some people thrash and resist against the crowd and canter along on their own paths. While there is no objectively better choice, one must optimize between their individuality and outside influence because no one else is doing that for them.
A special mention in my memoir must go to the most fun time I’ve spent on campus: April – May 2021, which was (quite literally) the final semester on acid. Yes, there were a million things to rue. We had lost all of our final year, no treats outside campus, no airstrip photoshoots, no Antaragni, no Galaxy, situation deteriorating all over the country – the list goes on. Two of my closest wingmates couldn’t come because of rising Covid cases. But each one of us used this time to purge ourselves of all the pent up emotions of the last year. Assignments and deadlines were forgotten as people strutted around in their vacation clothes and sunglasses in a month-long party. It was a time of reliving old memories while making new ones, of celebrating old connections and forging new bonds and I’m hugely grateful for being able to spend that time with some of the most special people in my life. Before we knew it, the shades we were using to pose for pictures were being used to hide tears. There is something about knowing that a familiar face is not going to be around which always makes you crack up, even if you took that face for granted when they were around. A year at home had pushed my emotions regarding campus memories so deep beneath my skin that I mistook that for them not being there at all. But walking the familiar paths and seeing those familiar faces brought everything right back and I am glad to have a chance at those goodbyes.
Going back to my room after a year was therapeutic. Wiping off the layer of dust, I was greeted by a life that I had forgotten. My whiteboard with unfinished tasks that didn’t matter anymore. A moth-eaten box of cigarettes that I had not bought for myself. The clothes I was supposed to wash but did not. The router that we had forgotten to turn off, waiting dutifully for devices that had forgotten it. Books, notes and test papers from courses that I would never think about again. Each object sent me down a road of memories that I had stashed in some corner of my mind.
This piece is one of my last shouts into the void as a student of IITK, and I thank you if you have stuck with me till the very end. I feel it’s fitting to end with one of my favourite passages from a movie –
“..it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life… You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry… you will someday.”
Written by- Anirudh Anil Ojha
Edited by- Ayush Anand, Abhimanyu Sethia
