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Janhvi Rochwani is a graduating Y20 student from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. In the third edition of As We Leave, she takes us on a journey filled with captivating experiences, profound friendships, and the ever-changing college life.
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.
Readers are highly encouraged to play the “audiobook” as they read because:
- I think I convey the flow much better as a storyteller than a writer, and
- I like the sound of my own voice
It is 5:15 AM on May 6th, 2024, and as I see the sky lighten and grow yellow-gold, and my friends in various stages of sleep being bumped around by the hastily-booked Vikram auto that is taking us to Bithoor for my first visit in 2.5 years of living in Kanpur, I start to write the intro to this AWL in my head.
And then I decide it is too complicated.
Hi! For any stranger who has somehow arrived here, I’m Janhvi. Or Jahnvi, depending on your persuasion. I’m a recently graduated Computer Science and Engineering student from this obscure li’l place called IITK. You may have seen me roaming around with my hall 2 boys (Aditya, Akhil, Soham), grabbing candies from any nearby canteen, or always sitting alone in the H6 mess. Or you may have seen me running around for some Gender Cell work, at a Book Club event, or sitting in the senate hall alternately trying to talk sense and enjoying the ✨drama✨.
Aditya ke teen dost (Soham, me & Akhil)
Or you may have never seen me. After all, this campus is big enough for the both of us. And if I am to talk about the time I’ve spent here, I will have to talk about who I was before. So bear with me.
PFA my bio-data: funny lil fat kid, good at academics, bold and loud and sometimes mean. And then I “chose” JEE because my options were that or NEET, and I didn’t want to repeat what my sister had done. I spent almost two years of my life studying daily at my coaching for 12 hours straight (do not call me a Maggu™), and then six months of lockdown exclusively reading questionable fanfiction off of questionable websites. This included not touching a single textbook or quiz or talking to a single teacher or peer from the coaching or elsewhere.
It was quiet, it was lonely, and like many other people, I was incredibly lost. Instead of going back to my “shell”, I kind of barrelled straight into a cell and chose to not even peep out.
Dark, dark times. Dark like a gulab jamun
Thank all the gods for C*vid ending. And thank God for IITK.
Our first semester was such a confusing experience. I’d been on the internet for years at that point, but only to watch or read or listen and never to interact with a real new person, a real stranger. Youtubers or authors or musicians didn’t prepare me for the alarm I felt when I saw Girik Maskara’s innocent text asking me if I wanted to be added to the department group. (I ended up going to my first college trip with him and some other friends). Oh well, you live and learn.
On 18th November 2020, I attended my first “class”. On the 25th, I joined Prayas which remained with me throughout college. On the 29th, I started talking to the person who soon became my absolute best friend. These people became more real to me than most people around, and it was mind blowing that we had never even met properly.
Aditya (the best friend)
(our first time outside campus, and one of our last events in campus)
It was not all hunky-dory though. My weird style of not texting back for days at a time was naturally not to everyone’s tastes. I found people (like Akanksha) who I instantly connected with but we just couldn’t deal with each other online. I found her again slowly, very slowly, after coming to campus. On the other side, I lost friendships that worked beautifully online but we were just too different in the real world.
I met Shivangi when she had a boy cut and was dressed up as Percy Jackson. I met Raaghav because of an embarrassing misunderstanding where I may have come across as an anti-vaxxer.
Raaghav, who can now certify I’m not a facebook-level boomer
The point of all of this is to tell you how bizarre it was. But also to say I’m so grateful for these people. Because while we were making friends, we were also dealing with online classes, online labs, online discussions where no one speaks and we all just stare at the TA, or worse, one dumbass classmate keeps talking and talking and you can’t lamp him on the head for it because you promised to be a nonviolent person and also because, you know, you live hundreds of miles away. A touch-starved, emotionally starved, pent up generation of children trying to breathe fresh air in the same four-walled rooms.
But like I said, thank God for IITK.
Because campus was the freshest breath of air I’d ever taken, the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen, the most free I (and most of us) have ever been.
Learning to ride a cycle with no hands. Do not repeat this stunt at home
I realise that most of this is about the journey to IITK and not in IITK, but I cannot sit here and summarise in a few hundred words how important the last two and a half years have been. You grow in this place more than anywhere else, you learn how to be a person, have a thought process, and have principles of your own. You learn how stupid you are (I will not even exemplify this because I was so embarrassingly stupid) and how smart you can be (I got an A in Suchitra ma’am’s course). You learn how to juggle academics with your interests and your relationships and your responsibilities. You learn how it feels to break down under immense pressure (6th sem, f*cking Compilers) and then whom to approach who will tell you to get your shit together (thank you, Jiya) and, again, breathe, babygirl.
With Gaurav (co-coordinator), Jiya (ex-coordinator & boss extraordinaire) at the Book Club
You can never see it coming because it’ll always find ways to surprise you. I’m a Book Club person, so I’ll tell you a story: once upon a time, this girl was having a really really terrible semester. Meanwhile, her 21st birthday was coming up. She develops a fear that the days before the birthday will remain really depressing, the day of the birthday will be a false hope of seemingly incoming happiness, of having only one good day. And that the days after the birthday will go back to their usual depressing programming.
Dear reader, the good day never came. It was all continuously crap.
Solution? Find people like Shivangi, who will stick by you in every sad funk
Not to say that IITK doesn’t surprise you pleasantly. I have met the most wonderful people through the Book Club and had the nerdiest possible discussions with them. Through Gender Cell, I have sometimes met people having the crappiest time of their life, but they have all been so resilient, so very brave. And if you look beyond us loud undergrads, you will find brilliant PhD folks, who are, at the end of the day, just like us. You will find incredibly sweet and hardworking SIS guard didis and bhaiyas, or the didi who cleans your room, or the bhaiya who works in your mess. If you talk to them, you will realise that our campus is an entire system, separate from the city but existing in the same unequal world. There are charms in IITK you can find nowhere else, true, but our system sometimes fails some of our residents spectacularly.
While it may not be your duty as a student, it is only by engaging with more than just academics or PoRs that we can be part of the community of this vivid place.
L to R: Karan, Akanksha, me, Prof Suchitra Mathur, Shreya, Priya
The campus is chock-full of interesting, funny and kind people. There are almost 10000 of us students in 1024 acres, and trust me, if you haven’t met your kind yet, keep looking. Trust that our campus does not disappoint. I met someone at the end of 5th semester and they are so cool and they like me and it’s awesome. I met someone I’d known since the 4th semester, but only started talking to them in the 8th and they are so cool and they like me and it’s awesome. I met several someones in the last 3 days as I write this and they are so cool and they seem to like me and it’s goddamn awesome. And it is so unfair that we have to leave.
CC Canteen? X. CSE Canteen ✓
L to R, top row: Abhishek, Mandar, Arnav, me, Aryan, Akshat;
bottom row: Dishay, Kushagra, Akhil, Soham, Aditya.
I imagine July of this year, when a new set of wide-eyed 18 year olds will be entering this campus and I won’t be able to meet them. I won’t be able to be part of the community that welcomes them here, to their new home. So to any juniors or anyone on campus reading this, please enjoy yourselves. For all our sakes.
Siddhant, Srishti, Avni, Jahnvi Jr., Abhinav: some of my favourite bacche
It hurts so unbelievably much to leave IITK, but I am glad that I got to meet the people here and that I share something deeply beautiful with them, that I got the chance to experience this life and that I get to have a home I can carry with me to the world outside these red brick walls.
The end.
Written by : Janhvi Rochwani
Edited by: Dhriti Barnwal, Kushagra Srivastava
Designed by: Sanyam Shivhare
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