Akanksha Biswal is a Y20 Master’s student from the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering. In this edition, she recalls her journey leading her to IITK, the struggles the pandemic brought and her experience as a postgraduate student at the institute.
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.
“It’s funny how each day you wake up and never really know if it will be the one that will change your life forever.” – The Secret World of Arrietty
It is the most cliched story in the world – you spend your life preparing for a moment, and then the moment comes and leaves, and it just feels so feeble. Almost like the storm arrives and you are sleeping, and when you wake up in the morning, it is gone, only the weather, a faint reminder of what had transpired. I’ve imagined this for quite some time – how I’d churn out this one story that captures my time at IITK and leaves behind no detail. And today, as I write this, I realise I am caught up trying to find a beginning. But when you sit a little longer with this thought, do you start to understand that nothing ever really begins, does it? One story is a story picked up amidst tonnes of interwoven stories. Who even knows where it started and where it’ll end.
This story that I’ve picked up to tell you goes way back to the year 2018.I’d freshly gotten out of my undergraduate and was looking for opportunities to pursue a Masters. IIT Kanpur then had begun offering an MS in Cognitive Science. I remember coming to the campus for the interviews. I did not know what I was looking for. I did want to pursue further studies, but I wasn’t too sure what I could bring to the field.
Nevertheless, I had come for the interview to gain experience and, in the process, learn some things. They’d scheduled my interview for the second day. I do not remember which lecture hall it was, but I followed some routes, made my way to the CCD here on campus, and then took a long route back to the hall I’d been allotted for my stay. My undergraduate college was located in this busy area of Delhi. Numerous colleges are scattered here and there along the roads. The hustle-bustle of Delhi traffic often drowned the excited cheers from within the colleges. Evenings, we’d spend in cafes and other street food joints. It felt like you had wings, but you could never stretch out your arms enough. IIT Kanpur’s campus was a stark contrast to it. On my way back to Hall 6, I remember standing in front of the basketball court adjacent to the athletics ground and telling myself:
“If there were any place I’d like to be, it’d be this.”
I did not make it through the interviews. As the years poured in one after the other, the IIT Kanpur dream kept getting buried. When in 2020, I’d sat for the GATE examination, I barely remembered this little wish I had made once upon a time. It was mostly an attempt at moral support for many of my friends applying for the examination, and I thought it would be good fun. I ended up making it through the examination with a decent rank. This was the time when the pandemic had freshly struck. We were swamped with online coursework, illness, anxieties, and an abrupt shift to a world devoid of physical touch altogether. I rarely got to myself those two minutes of peace to think about what I could do with my GATE score. The counselling had started late. Everything had been chaotic. But one day, I woke up in the morning and checked the choice locking page to see that I’d gotten IIT Kanpur in the first selection. I’d locked. BSBE. I hadn’t informed my parents or my friends. It was almost like I knew. That was my moment. This was the one story I’d been waiting for – a dream that caught up to me when I was barely looking. Happiness that finds you suddenly like a faint breeze that floats in from underneath your door.
I haven’t spent a year on the campus yet, so while I did have the strong urge to begin this with “my years in IIT Kanpur-“, I’ll stop. My months at IIT Kanpur have reinstated my belief that there is more in the journey than the destination. I felt like a kid lost in a fair for the first month. However, because of my tryst with Japanese, I’d met some undergraduate folks in the online class, and a couple of us had stayed in touch. So, when on the second day, I searched for an ATM using Google Maps and landed in front of E-shop with nothing remotely close in sight, I had to call a friend from Japanese class. They guided me to the ATM while on the video call. Desperate times call for desperate measures! When I look back now, what felt like a giant maze that I’ll probably never get around, now feels like a city I’d been in all my life. That is how most things in life are. The unfamiliarity is soon replaced with comfort. You learn to navigate better. It gets tough before it starts to get easy. And I know no person on earth can convince you of this, and you will fail too. But it helps to have this thought at the back of your mind for days that might seem a little too difficult than the others.
Somedays, I’ve felt like I’ve caught my feet on two boats. Am I the pandemic batch, or am I the post-pandemic batch? It’s like experiencing both worlds. We’ve written our exams sitting in our homes for three hours with our cameras and mics on and having our parents call us out for dinner in the middle of it, and we’ve also danced till we dropped at Antaragini! I remember there was a point during that month where I felt like Vicky Kaushal in the movie “Masaan” crying “saala ye fests kaahe khatam nahi hota be?” I know I’ve gotten some mental daggers drawn. Still, it was overwhelming to be thrown from the mundane life you had thought will be the norm for quite some time to buzzing activity all over again. This, I feel, demands discussion. I always felt like the transition from a pandemic to a post-pandemic culture was never given its due. It is notorious – every change. It wrecks your mental health. I felt like a fish out of water for a long time when I landed on the campus. Everyone was a stranger around me, and in all that hustle and bustle of faces, cliques, and canteens, I almost felt like I did not belong. I was living the dream I’d once had, and in that dream, everything wasn’t as rosy as I’d pictured it to be. Everything felt like it was stagnant, suspended in time. During the first couple of months on the campus, I faced some personal setbacks too. I was insanely lucky to have two very close friends who made me feel like I deserved a lot more fun in my life. And this is another big lesson I learned in college. That, often we forget the good in ourselves. Even though we’ve internalised the idea that we should put ourselves first, it doesn’t translate too well into our actions when facing circumstances. It is easy to get lost in the middle of so many people here. What is difficult to achieve is your foothold. To stand up for yourself and for things you believe.
For a long time, I had difficulty opening up to people. I would be throwing my head back and laughing but in my mind, I would be floating somewhere else. I’d be working on my thesis but not really putting my heart into it. But with some great support, I was able to find my step. One of my biggest complaints about not being motivated to wake up in the morning has been replaced by a phase where I wake up early. My friends and I either go for a run or hear each other crib about muscle pain. I got back to painting and writing. I started to spend a significant part of the day in the lab. I realised how I’d put myself in the backseat in all of these interactions. The most challenging climb you’d probably have to do is regain that confidence and belief that you can and will feel better in some time. But get a bunch of reliable friends and do things that make you happy, say, paint a picture or sing a song or watch someone skateboard, and I tell you, you’ll make it. While I say this, I also want you to know that checking up on your friends is equally important. As the student community in IIT K, we shoulder this responsibility to make the campus a safe place. And all of it starts with us. It begins with kindness.
Undergraduate folks are a significant part of my social circle on campus. And it was primarily because of the Japanese class I’d taken in my first year. Sometimes, some friends would talk about an incident, and midway I’d finish the story for them because I’d already heard it from the folks in my Japanese class! But the account has been a little different for many of my batchmates from MTech. PG students have very heavily dominated their circles. While I acknowledge that many factors may contribute to this, I still find this a little unsettling. It is a vibrant, buzzing campus, and if there is one thing I felt needed to change, it would be to remove the “barriers” that make this interaction between UGs and PGs difficult. I believe we have a lot to learn from each other. I wanted to join many cultural clubs, but often, my hesitance came from the fact that I barely saw any PG students on the board. And I was confused for a long time as to whether the clubs even entertained PG students. Many things like pre-registering for courses were completely new things for us, and it felt like we could’ve done with smoother navigation
But I’ve had a lot of fun here. I have laughed till I cried, spent evenings on rooftops, attended the Japanese class from OAT, discussed conspiracy theories while making our way to the Environmental Science building, named dogs, eaten every special dinner at each hall, planned things that haven’t materialised yet, made people hear the trashiest jokes they will ever hear in a lifetime, been a TA in a course and read some really interesting assignments, spent entire days at CCD sometimes (read: most of the time) not really working on the thesis but hearing stories about campus life and people and definitely ranting, helped set friends up on dates, gotten my hair coloured more number of times than the seasons I’ve seen on this campus, encouraged and been very successful at getting others to dye their hair too, obsessed over corn and “mess ka khaana” at some point (trust me, there is a phase in everyone’s lives where they desperately miss mess food no matter how much they’ve hated it), cried when people started leaving campus, switched from coffee to tea to water to coffee, painted rainbows on beautiful, beautiful people, played Valorant with a team and beaten some asses and gotten ours beaten too, found the highest points on the campus, been broke at the middle of each month without fail and met some terrifically amazing people. I named this piece “Round Trips” because as college ends, I realise that some bookings are one-way. Your college life isn’t a round trip. It’ll never be the same people or the same time again. So when you pack your bags and leave this campus, you must ensure you do not leave behind what-ifs. The sad part about your what-ifs is that they’ll probably never be found. They’ll probably gather dust in the corner of the room you last occupied on the campus or hide behind the paper bills at the CCD counter. Nobody writes your story after you. So make sure that whenever you want to try something and feel like you’ll have time later, perhaps you’ll not. It feels like it was yesterday I reached campus. As I write this article, I know how dangerously close I am to having my last day on campus. I wish I could stay longer. I wish I could get some other people to stay longer, too, because what will this campus feel like without the familiar faces?! I’m also extremely grateful to a bunch of people who I can’t imagine the campus without – Tarish, Ruchira, Vinay, Shahid, Abhijeet, Ratnangshu, Akhilesh, Subham, Avisha, Pratham, Adithya, the Decision Lab, my supervisor, the pups of the campus who grew up too soon and every other person who I’ve gotten the chance to interact with during my time at the campus. I’m also indebted to the Japanese class fraternity (special mentions: Tarish and Yash) for giving me a glimpse of campus life way before I was here.
Time will zoom past you. So do the things that bring you joy. There are tons of things to do on the campus and tons of facilities that you’ll never get in one place. So make use of it. And even better, talk to the crazy talented people here. We hold ourselves back so often because we make assumptions in our heads. The world out there is beautiful. Give people a chance. Let the sunshine enter. Things may go wrong, but you’re stronger than that. Someone has got your back. And more importantly, remember your life isn’t a round trip either. We rarely get to re-live moments. So what we have right now, let’s make the most out of it!
As I leave, I carry this warm feeling in my heart. It reminds me of this poem I’d read way back in school. It said:
“Today the world is a little more my own-” (Punishment in Kindergarten, Kamala Das). Today, it is.
Written by: Akanksha Biswal
Edited by: Tanya Soni, Bhavya Sikarwar
