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In this edition of As We Leave 2024, Vijay Bharadwaj, a Y20 B-Tech student in the department of Mechanical Engineering, talks about his creative identity his journey as an IITK student and the vulnerability there in. His AWL explores his role in the campus cultural affairs, the significance of his friends in his journey and how transformative this journey has been for him. Read on for a wonderfully wholesome experience.
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.
I have a problem with the idea of an “As We Leave”. As much as I can just ignore words and delve into yapping about how my college life was, I think some literary tomfoolery may help my case of a terrible attentional memory, which has basically made my academic journey since 2006 (when I joined pre-school) extremely drab-seeming in my own head.
I think I don’t have a life interesting enough to tell y’all, simply because I don’t remember half of the stuff I used to find interesting, or just didn’t pay enough attention to what could’ve been interesting.
Hence, I’ll zabardasti subvert. And find a way for myself to naturally remember stuff and weave it into a story that I hope y’all find…palatable.
So, I have a problem with the idea of an “As We Leave”.
Why? It’s very restrictive.
How? It seems to me as if only thoughts that are shared “as” the graduating batch graduates, matter.
Only thoughts that are shared as “we” vacate, matter.
That only thoughts that we invoke as we “leave”, matter.
This is a collection of short anecdotal chunks, which are all BUT my thoughts “as” “we” “leave”.
As. “While something else is happening.”
While. Why just “while”?
Despite We Leave…
I have been blessed to be a ‘decently’ close part of IIT Kanpur’s cultural affairs. Not to be confused with the “campus culture”, but rather Media and Culture activities.
I was good at what could be called a precursor to design. What kind? The drawing-and-sketching, ain’t-no-direction kind. Since high-school. I remember starving myself at home trying to attend a Zoom orientation about the Design and Animation Club.
My journey to learning has been through a very freewheeling, self-exploratory route. I have played with things on my own, seized independence in creating fearlessly and attained pleasure in it – which I still uphold as the best way to learn anything, even after 4 years – be a kid about it. As James Victore says, in what is obsessively my favorite quote ever:
The things that made you weird as a kid – make you great today.
This has forever been my guiding principle.
I discovered something about campus club affairs the day I had my Design and Animation Club Coordinator Interview.
The realisation of coordi interviews being a stress test than a gauge of how well you can propagate and inspire told a lot about how clubs are designed to operate. Them being about how club seniors take pride in being intimidating, and how suddenly operating a club stops being about passion and turns into managerial business, is something I find ugly.
I believe culture is not business. Sure – to everyone who says you have to manage inventory, people, events, bills – I agree. But if you tell an artist to not make a castle out of playing cards “because” it’s fragile and can’t be transported to the exhibition, that’s some BS.
And, this increasing emphasis to PoRs and getting white-collar opportunities by assigning tangible scores to being a Coordinator at X Club or Y Society enforces it further.
For one, the exhibition comes second to the art. The exhibition enables the art, but doesn’t lead to it. The management should allow for creativity to show in a better way – not suppress it. Deadlines. Monetary limits. Pressure to show and create. “Ye kya hai? Why is it this way?” should not be hurdles to what the main purpose of a club (I believe) is – fostering multidimensionality in an otherwise unidimensional set of what I call trade-school “factory products” – as a senior often claims.
You (the reader) may agree or disagree. I just seek from you to understand.
I tried with THC to fix this (you may see a mention or two of it if you continue to read my ramblings), but I feel:
Despite we leave, this mechanisation of club affairs may remain to be a sad reality.
Before We Leave…
The paradox of departure is that I don’t think it is a singular event.
I left the first time I finished first year. It gave me a whiff of how college feels – the (beautiful) fragility of social circles, confidence …and the idea of merit.
Being the academic topper of my batch at school, it was hard for me to transition into cheating for academic credit. Trust me, I made notes for PE101. I learned. I am still bad at it, but I did just enough. Growing up with this fear of cheating on acads made me more self-reliant, albeit put me in unfavorable circles, as you could guess – cheating circles were really instrumental in creating friendships in an online semester.
I left again when I returned home for vacations after my first offline semester. It showed me the contrast of what the world was going to be, and how different it was from where I stayed for so many years. It was an unsettling revelation about life after graduation. Even if I juggle between home and campus – what would I call home once I leave and pursue professional/further academic niceties?
And so I have been leaving ever since – when I left campus for doing my internship at Bengaluru, my last lab course, when I furnished no dues at Hall 1, when each of my wingies started vacating their Hall 1 rooms, when my parents landed in Kanpur to pick me up and a thousand times more before I stepped foot into my house. And at home, I still do occasionally, most recently during the Manchester Derby, that I could have watched at A-315 with my wingies.
However, I’d like to tell everyone how I learnt that leaving is the best way to give validity to your experiences – it only goes on to show how strong it actually made you, that you could imagine a life without it. Even if Caesar said that the valiant never taste of death but once, I believe no one is ever born valiant, and all of these deaths prepare you for your destiny.
Before we leave, let’s all die a little.
As They Leave…
I have decided to write this section the way I should, because what I am about to say can’t stay unwritten, and reject my ideas of continuing this narrative the way I planned it to be, and instead, keeping important things towards the end.
This graduation is going to end up in “them” leaving – people. Not just people, but people with me, in a space like the campus, where I get to live the same freedom and intention with them. It’s the complete package that I am surrendering to the uncertain future.
This is impartial gratitude to:
- Arth Banka, Rishav Bikarwar and Shivam Singhal – for being such a great first team (for readers other than these three – we were OneInfiniteLoop on the first SnT Code)
- Nandini Goel, for bringing me my first group of friends, giving academic validation by asking me for lab reports and that Hanuman Mandir plaque – amongst other things.
- Aayush Kumar, Girik Maskara, Jahnavi Kairamkonda, Varad Agarwal and Rachit Khamesra, for being a part of that first group, and tolerating me on those video calls.
- Samarth Arora, Sarthak Kohli, Abhishek Pardhi and Sweta Kumari, for being a positive force around me for time and beyond; and Ishita Agarwal for being a creative force.
- Kshiteesh Bhardwaj, Devansh Singh, Ablokit Joshi, Shivam Mishra, Ritik Tiwari, Deepesh Maan, et al for being my (pseudo) first wing on campus.
- Anshul Jain, Agrim Pandey, Afraz Jamal, Sanmati Pande and Sathwika for being the most delightful and best roommates I could ever get.
- Granth Chaudhary, Saksham Arora, Nitin Kumar and Shubhada Mane for being welcome faces at FMC and the Cult Meet.
- Raj Verma, Kunal Singh and Mahavir Agarwal for being my room away from my room, and being the best hosts to an exam prep all-nighter.
- Arnav Pandey, Kushal Sosale, Ahmed Amaan, Utkarsh Kandi, Somansh Dubey, Aniket Sharma and Ayush Gupta for saving my sanity on ME courses.
- Aman Agarwal, for being the best product pal I could get.
- Pranjal Sharma, Aditya Subramanian, Adarsh Shettigar, Akshat Arya, Akshat Bajaj, Mayank Upreti, Satmeet Singh, Utkarsh Gupta, Parth Govil and Ankur Kumar for the endless cyber cafe service, FIFA nights, booze business, emotional support, Goa trip, fest huddles and being the absolute best people to be around in my last year.
- Ishita Vyavahare, for being the most hip, my go-to for a photoshoot and being an absolute vibe.
- Shivang Jaiswal, Bharat Sethia and Mayank Mishra for being my safe space, being the best co-founders and the best trip of my life so far.
- Advait Vashi for being my day-one, right till the end of Day 2 (of placements) and beyond.
Edit: I thought I did something with the wordplay, and then the thing with my placement offer happened. Welp.
- Shantanu ‘अवैध कब्जा’ Sirothia, quite simply, for being the best Sitaara to this Taara.
- and, finally, Shreya ‘Kela Burgerpasta’ Bhattacharya: my unwavering support, best friend, confidante, and the light of my life.
Should my memory fail and I overlook anyone, anticipate a message from me. I should stop, lest this keeps going on and on. 😅
As they leave, I sense a void that may not truly exist, yet I will never feel whole again.
As I Leave…
I am certainly leaving differently. I had the fortune of establishing The Hip-Hop Collective at IIT Kanpur, with some of the best people I could do it with.
I remember when I first met Shivang [Jaiswal]. It was in Hall 3, where we were all fresh from the smears of the lockdown and ignited by the camaraderie of the resource-constraint crowd on campus. I found in him, a space for unwinding about my somewhat repressed yearning for hip-hop music, and later, alternate expression on philosophy, humans, society and intoxicants.
We stayed together in the summer, and created music. One of our first tracks was titled “Why Are We Here”, we made it in a continuous session of around 24 hours, from a rough recording of a Music Club performance at CCD featuring Mayank [Mishra]. It was a newfound love of creation – and it felt different to how I used to create music. A lot of my old stuff (which is on streaming platforms) was execution-focused, even if it came at the expense of artistic satisfaction. This was solely for the love of creating new stuff and fiddling with it – with no urgency for execution.
“Why are we here?”
The sample from the Music Club performance, chopped and composed for the final demo.
Hence, things moved forward with this creative space flourishing.
Shivang was associated with the Music Club, which he was seemingly growing out of, due to a clash of interests and a lack of palatability about a lot of ideas Shivang had. Naturally, as he was a producer, amongst singers and instrumentalists. The tumult started when Shivang, me and Mayank wanted to do a performance for the Freshers with Music Club, and there were contentions to how the club cannot represent “rapping” to “pre-recorded instrumentals”, or allowing non-members or people who say they “don’t do auditions” for the club. It felt to me as if there was an air of perceived disinclination to hip-hop as music, and we were motivated to find ourselves stage time in the midst of this challenge.
We did, and we came up with The Hip-Hop Collective. I believed that any culture (here, any entity under the Media and Cultural Council) should allow for counter-culture, otherwise it ends up being just coercion. We had simple ideals: create with no fear of execution and failure. Creating willfully, limitlessly and exploratively in a collective environment allows for a liberatory exchange of ideas and leads to wonderful learning and artistic output.
This is exactly how we enabled around ten absolute newbie Y22s who hardly had the sonic aptitude to listen and stay on the beat, to pull off an amazing Freshers’ performance and nail their bit bar-for-bar – in just under four days. We saw our hypothesis on learning and propagating culture come true.
But what about me? I found love for creation. I saw myself in the kids we learnt how to rap with. I put myself in a space where I could feel the urge to learn more and push myself with these kids, than focusing on delegating and ordering for stuff to happen.
As I leave, I am glad to have originated a haven for hip-hop culture at IIT Kanpur. Despite not having anyone to look up to myself, I am proud to have partaken in creating something that now leaves the campus with more role models for future batches to admire and be inspired by.
Leave. As we “go away”? Are we going away?
As We Come Closer to IITK…
One of my biggest insecurities I had the first two years here, was whether I had made the right choice coming to IIT Kanpur.
I had the opportunity of studying Economics at St. Stephens, and I was actually looking forward to joining (even the first year course handouts had started hitting my email!). It was only the gnawing guilt of “I didn’t grind through two years of JEE prep for nothing”, that I had to surrender my admission there.
This letter, as you may see below, gnawed me for two whole years. It kept me distant from the identity of an IITian, or being proud of it.
IIT Kharagpur, because I had a few rounds of counseling to go.
I was conflicted, because I didn’t know where my creative pursuits would stand in the hyper-competitive milieu of an IIT, but also didn’t know how a DU college would do justice to my academic excellence (so far then) and people who said “Venkat ji ka beta IIT jayega”.
Some of my fears did come true coming to IIT – unfair academic competition, a general automatism to resorting to the handful pre-set avenues for a job, and seeing it be reduced to an open reservoir of quests to collect resume points. I now believe it was my short-sightedness in associating such harsh thoughts with everyone who was doing so, but only if I could go back in time and fix my line of thought!
Despite wanting to chase the so-called average IIT dream, I could not come to terms with it. I struggled, therefore. No branch change, no projects with professors, no fancy PoRs. I would frantically call up every senior I knew to tell them how I couldn’t figure out what to do in life. But it would never seem like I had enough time then to be able to tend to their suggestions.
However, it was coming to me – how doing nothing just because I don’t like anything a hundred percent – was exactly the reason I felt the anxiety to even start. Shreya remembers me not even being serious about the internship drive, before something hit me that caused things to see an upward curve – the Bain shortlist. I remember not having put in a lot of effort to make that resume (in contrast to today’s standards), but getting that shortlist gave me a nudge that maybe I was missing out on so much, just because I was not trying.
For good or for bad, I started to forage my life journey and started stringing together a story that could explain the way things happened to me. It gave me perspective – on how things were not so bad with IITK at all.
My journey was defined not by conscious choices to have a journey, but by a clash of anxieties, aspirations and pure luck. Maybe, just maybe – that’s what IITK was about – it was a continuum of strong resolve on one hand, and equally, a beautiful and plastic fragility of keeping up with a standard of excellence we used to stand for, on the other.
Things started looking brighter when I came out of my unidimensional view of IITK. I took initiative and carved a niche with THC. I combined my newfound potential in ‘business problem solving’ and saw it in intersection with my creative pursuits – to eventually get placed in a product role.
(Edit, a week later: This aged like milk – but we move. Still, I am in a product role – just not “placed” in it. 🥲)
Even after I vacate the campus – every interaction with an alumnus founder, every call with a junior asking me for advice, every workshop invite I receive, and every friend in town calling me by “Aur bhyi, IIT!” makes me feel like I did justice to the ethos of IITK. It makes me own up everyday, come closer to this institute and be prouder and prouder of being a part of it.
As we leave, and come closer to IITK every passing minute, we should realize that part of us will always roam these corridors, as it was never about finding our place in IITK – it was about letting IITK find a place in us.
Written by: Vijay Bharadwaj
Edited by: Diya Motagi, Zehaan Naik
Design by: Sanyam Shivare
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