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In this 22nd edition of As We Leave, Kunaal Gautam, a Y21 student from the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering, reflects on his time at IIT Kanpur — not through grand milestones, but in the quiet, everyday moments that came to mean everything. We witness how the campus, with its stolen naps, lingering walks, and fleeting conversations, grew from a place of uncertainty to one of belonging.Through it all, what remains is a deep affection — for the people, the spaces, and the ordinary days that quietly became unforgettable.
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 IITK.
Life often feels like a linear journey.
Cause and effect.
Days appearing as repeatable units that occur again and again. The days bleeding into weeks and months and poof, it’s over? Perhaps that’s what happens when we try to see all of it together at once. We feel too small, too insignificant, and maybe a little powerless? The vastness of our lives in front of us often causes us worry and headaches –‘Kya karunga mai?’– rather than a sense of curiosity and adventure for the tales unknown. Those words are often more apt for novels and stories.
But aren’t these stories the reimaginings of the world around us? The people around us? And how these interact with each other and create the very lore we might be reading on a page. I like reading books a lot, escaping into those worlds which are but a figment of the imagination of some authors, but the key difference being that, those stories might encompass a whole life in a matter of a few pages. I don’t get the option of jumping to checkpoints, to experience life as I’m watching a netflix show, pushing the right arrow key everytime I come to a boring segway. I have a tendency to yap and jump to tangents, but the central point still emerges: we are shit at modelling the future. We take a fraction of variables and relations in the graph and make (un)reasonable predictions, often committing heavy overfitting based on our past experiences. So, then what is the point in searching for the bigger picture, the bigger meaning (most of the times we can’t even commit to a dinner 3 weekends down because the boss might claim that time :P)
The meaning has to emerge from the process, the very act of experiencing each day and living onto the next. Over the years, the days might blend into each other, but each day in IITK has been somewhat different for me, changing me and people around me, always telling me more, always making me feel curious about the next day. Capturing everything that happened in this place is impossible, there are so many times that I myself realise something amiss that I might not even have thought about in my 4 years here. But I would like to attempt to describe a more-than-a-typical day here, a day that I might have lived a thousand times but I would give anything to live one more time.
🎶 Ode to the Mets – The Strokes🎶
(..Not gonna wake up here..) The alarm rings, for the 7th time in an afternoon as I snooze it again – Just 5 more minutes, the cooler is on, the birds are chirping and the pillow is soft. I often wonder that why we never get to sleep enough – it feels so absurd that we think of sleep as this negotiable thing, that is equivalent to drinking water – “baad me piliyo bhai, chill hai”– rather than something akin to breathing (“bhai aur wait karunga saas lene me toh tu hi leliyo fir”). After joining work here in Mumbai, sleeping as an activity is for the weekend, but god do I miss those afternoon siestas.
But enough is enough, it’s 4 and I have to reach Dissent by 5:10, since the instructor does not like when anyone is late to the class. It’s very valid if you enter late in a class of 7 sitting in a round table, both your absence, and the concurrent late presence, is noticeable. I walk out to the wing, and see a small horde of people passing around lollipops and laughing a lot. This is what you love about college, and it is this image which old people are nostalgic about when they talk about “those times”. You live in a mini-city in IITK, in hall-1 with these people you know and adore, and anytime that you’re going anywhere, you find these mini-rest stops of people, just standing together, talking about anything under the sun (one time, a friend of mine was describing how he tried to make smoke bombs, and successfully, used them to feel like a ninja), and having the time of their lives. One of my friends is a metaphorical manifestation of a rest stop – he operates a walking shuttle to Suraj tea stall 10 times a day (even if you’re reading this years after its release, there’s a chance you might find him walking with a purpose as the sun sets).
But what is it that prevents us from recreating this? If our life is in our control, why not search for this — I think the word we’re looking for is ‘Community’— and attempt to create that in your life. It is this feeling of community that makes IITK so special and got me through the highs and lows of that phase of my life. It is this community which is invaluable beyond words and something that the market might never be able to value, no amount of money can simply buy it out of thin air. It’s an active act of creation, of finding people and creating spaces wherein you canbe yourself and be loved for it. I chose IITK over anything else, because I thought I might find cool people here but I found something much more: the most crazy sets of people who made me feel like myself, much more than any individual introspection ever could. And if I could advice anything from my position as a graduate to the people who still call this home (newsflash: no one knows anything so take it with a pinch of salt) find people who you can spend hours with, people with whom you can hang out without planning or a reason to meet, people with whom you don’t have to think ki hum baat kya karenge. You might not find exactly what you envision, and that’s a good thing because, like I said, no one knows anything lol.
(..Waitin’ for me down on the street..) So, after a 20-minute detour of silly yaps, I exit the block, walking towards the back gate, humming to the background music ringing in my ears. I walk past the cycle stand, my cycle having been stolen and re-stolen and so on in a cycle, and see Peanut and Bojack fighting over a piece of bread. A friend of mine named them this due to the color of their fur, and since they hung around in our block (both the puppies and the friend), the name stuck. I like dogs a lot, because it always feels as if they know where they are going, the exact opposite of what I feel most of the time :P. Anytime you look at a dog, they are exploring the same road which they have been on since the first year, always sniffing around as if after years of digging, they’ll now strike gold. There are so many dog gangs in IITK, with them constantly barking and growling at each other till the clock strikes the hour, whence they unite and start barking at us, exiting our classes/halls.
The tribalism in dogs resembles those we see among students in our campus. It’s both arbitrary and aggressive, and often unites against the common enemy: be it exams or placements or professors. We always feel a tendency to join a tribe, a group of friends that we can roam around with and be identified with, lest we are left alone, without any tribe, unrecognisable, invisible. God, the pressure is huge for a kid just entering college, after years of only talking to their coaching material, to find peers that they can spend every waking moment with. I remember the anxiety I felt when the first semester started online and I felt I would be left behind. By the time that I actually met different people, they would already be best buds, having so many zoom calls and online study sessions to share, and I would feel like an outsider.
Kids, It’s overrated. Think about how fundamentally a group existing sustainably seems so improbable. The more the people, the more the inter-relations, the more the chaos. It’s not tight knit groups we chase, but people and friends. I might sound a bit naive, but IITK gives you so many chances to meet interesting people that might just be solitary endpoints in a social graph, that you would never be alone here. I was never part of a sustainable group (it imploded in half a year), but I have a loose amalgamation of people and small groups that I love and adore. The one advantage of such individual relations is that it is always a choice that you spend time with them. And doesn’t that affirm the fact that this is what friendship is? A choice to spend time together and have fun, to be able to depend on each other when the world around is in chaos.
Dear reader, I understand that these words ring hollow when you feel all alone on the weekend in your hostel room, but keep trying – because what this place gives you via wings, clubs, teams and courses is a chance to meet people that might just stick around in later chapters of your lives.
(..Back from his trip, he’s at the door..) I hurry up and reach academic area gate 3, waving to hordes of people passing me by. I get stopped by a couple of juniors, all excited about a club event, “Aap aana bohot maza aayega” and then excitedly yapping about their plans for the said event. Think about clubs and societies under the gymkhana as a concept. A group of people congregating all because they like a specific activity and then doing it together. In a college life where everyday is a constant juggle between attendance, assignments, exams (don’t forget the thousand man hours for “upskilling”), it seems almost silly to meet in the litsoc room for hours debating on the most weird motions and yet it is one of the happiest memories of my college life. Perhaps because when you remove the life-deciding competitive stakes of cpi/intern/placement, being with people and doing activities for the sake of doing them feels content.
Peeps, listen to me, alright, not everything has to have a grand meaning within the cosmos of life propelling you into a cushy future, some things can just be. I never debated because I thought it might help me with public speaking (who wants to speak to them anyway) or any XYZ reason, I did it because I loved abstracting and talking about how I would deal with situations or issues while being consistent with some ideas I have of the world. Now you may have different reasons for doing stuff but if it aligns with the way you feel and express yourself, it can be a liberating experience. And there’s something different about meeting people who come from different walks of life, from different places, from different years, all uniting to do nothing productive (according to the market).
4:42!
(..Innocent time, out on his own..) I panic thinking, how I could have spent nearly 40 minutes and still not reach the one class I want to attend in a day. But then I stopped. What am I panicking about? What’s the hurry? You know as well as I do that the faculty building ain’t far away. Then why feel the anxiety, that I have somewhere to be, something to do, not even a second to waste, because there’s so much. But is there?
Have you ever looked at the trees in the academic area when the afternoon sun is just dipping in the winters? The sun rays shine like gold through the leaves, charging everything it lands on with a color that a camera is never able to capture. I love the IITK campus — there’s so many splashes of colors everywhere, from the faded red bricks of the library, to the leafy green trees to the algae-filled-not-cleaned-frequently-enough fountain (yeah, not everything is picturesque).
You never really can see trees rising above you when you’re outside – there’s always a building or a statue or a hoarding in the way. The most you can see in a city is maybe some trees sticking out but then you go there and realise its a park (with entry and exit timings duh). A thing that I tried doing in my 4th year was to stop myself in the most hectic of times and just try to notice different elements in my environment – to just remind myself of what is natural and what is constructed, that maybe the contentment I feel here is an indicator that only grinding myself to dust can’t be the only way to find happiness. That these things matter. That life cannot just be a never-ending race, even though the world is fast and you might be left behind.
Left behind by whom? The academic area is a beautiful place, at least the old parts, with people sitting on the ground in front of L20 in the winters, trying to capture some warmth in the cold. The meadow besides the walkway looks magical when the flowers are blooming. (Forgive my waxing words for flowers, I just see corporate grey and ‘off-white’ most of the day). Just take a seat. It’s going to be fine.
(..It’s the last one now, I can promise you that..) After spending some more valuable minutes walking around, instead of taking left, I walk straight through the side doors of CCD, almost reflexively. I don’t like coffee but CCD feels like one of the central nerves of the campus, a place where you can see people from far away lands (such as Hall 9) as well as territories much closer (My best friend next door has a crazy coffee addiction).
I walk around, just waving to people and stealing a bite of the croissant from here and there. I see a liberal Salman bhai going to the pool, to swim his troubles away. I see Vox people in a corner discussing a new article. I wave to my love, and she grins at me for a second before resuming her excited chatter, impassionately continuing on, daring anyone to interrupt her. I see a yapper with a cold coffee and a chilli cheese toast in her hand, hunched over her laptop , hiding it like it has all the answers in the world (She was a TA, so maybe for a very small subset of the world). I walk to the counter, seeing the coffee addict grab the cup of cappuccino and walk to the wall.
The wall. No place like it exists in the world. It’s almost as if it’s a place which unites people. Students. I take an empty seat as the coffee monster besides me takes a huge gulp of coffee, nearly burning his tongue.
I almost do not recognize myself before IITK. Or maybe even most years in between. College has been a cultural revolution, the likes of which I never could have imagined. I have found friends here, suffered heartbreak, been humbled multiple times, found the meaning of life, only for it to dissolve, in an ever flowing state of change. I have found the love of my life here. I have found family here. I have felt complete.
I look at my watch. It’s 5.
Maybe just 5 more minutes?
Written by: Kunaal Gautum
Edited by: Manya Dixit, Saurya Singh
Designed by: Pankhuri Sachan
