Prelude to War

“Whom the Gods love die Young”

Nothing is merrier than being young with the world on your shoulder; it displays a possibility so seductive, you start to feel that there must be something more important that you could be doing than just studying for an exam. Everyone has a reason to do something; the reason may range from a simple satisfaction in doing the work, to maybe a responsibility one could not simply avert, or from recent revelations probably an attempt to defend ones ideology. With so much to my credentials, it would not be a surprise if many attempt to ponder upon my own motivations. What made me work for the Students’ council for year or with the Gymkhana for more than two years? Why was I with Voices? What made me actively help in managing the Scholarship hike campaign when the nationwide protests were declared? What makes me lead when I could be happy following?

I have always walked that line very carefully, keeping secrets rather than telling lies, and here there is no secret to divulge. I have no ideology to defend; I am a person with a “mindset” rather than a “set mind”, this makes me adhere to sense and logic and accommodate conflicting notions without any pride and prejudice.   The unity in our campus that breaks the diversity in age, language and culture, or the position you hold here, when it comes to common problem, like mess subsidy or scholarship hike, when we all marched together, when we had a common issue to fight for, has always fascinated me. Anything done for the welfare of a larger community than oneself reduces the burden of one’s own consciousness and gives one the inner peace and outer strength to be of more service to the institute and then to the nation as a whole. While the unity in diversity fascinates me, I have grown to respect the diversity as well. To preserve the space for individual choices must not come at the cost that compromises on the unity; this might sometimes require us to keep some forces at check. The collective mind of such forces has no ultimate desire but a constant temptation for dividing the society, an obsession against the prevalence of unity.

Poisoning a popular mind, only a fool blames the victim. I am not someone’s puppet; I am not someone’s messiah, I will lead when I am sure of myself and seek guidance whenever necessary, I have always done what satisfies me and would continue to do so, no one dictates me as much as I dictate my own happiness and personal satisfaction.  I prefer to stand alone to preserve the unity rather than to stand together and break it.

It is not that I am too young to pick a side, but it is just that I am too wise not to pick one.

Entrance Exams & Coaching Centers: A Retrospect

Mother Nature herself in such matters has been prejudiced; as she concentrates her greatest devotion not to the maintenance of what already exists but on the selective breeding of offspring in order to carry on the species, a silent ploy by nature to topple the balance in the hands of the goddess of eternal justice with complete awareness of the fact that she is blindfolded, so how is it wrong if humans, a product of Mother Nature herself, have inherited this trait.

I considered myself lucky when destiny placed me among the top 1 percent of the students in such an exam, but this gives me neither reason nor a passion to speak highly of this process or enough experience to question the existence as such. When entrance exams was taken as an example to explain the survival of the fittest after successfully clearing them, the underlying irony never had a chance to be glimpsed upon as any attempts were drowned with proud smiles and nods and satisfied faces as they knew very well, they were all safely set apart by ditch called entrance exams that ran very wide and by fortune they were on the safer side of that ditch.

In all the hatred, fear and anxiousness surrounding the entrance exams, therein lay a spring that never dried up, and that spring in other words are the over ambitious coaching centers. Remember, coaching centers are here not because you need them, but YOU need them just because they are here.

These were the ones who understood the juvenile spirit of parentage and how they respond to a rallying cry of their child’s future, thus to the parent is the rallying cry first addressed. And hence, the child is made to enter into this vicious game. He arrives with little broken pieces of a dream, slowly, they clean up, dry him out, put him back together, piece by piece. They clear his heads, teach him confidence and discipline, and prepare him. They probably do a good job of this, but then there is the threat, fragile as he still is, and somewhere in between under pressure from school and parents has a break down, what he has worked so hard to produce is now past.

He now loiters about and passes senseless comments. He comes first to take position in the last bench and has a restless time waiting for the short ten minute break between the classes and then after the break prays for the teacher to be late. He begins to start drifting to the lower social level and mixes up with a class human beings through whom his mind is now poisoned, in addition to his mental misery he now lunges into a road to physical misery as well. Of course, the people who regularly ensure his fee is up to date know all this as well, and they still turn a blind eye, for the child comes at a cost, a stiff one indeed. Hence, they do their best, and strike the parents blind and make them stand near a corpse that bleeds with every sign of decomposition with a blank promise that these were indeed signs of renewed vitality of their dreams. Hence, the parents are made to spend extra resources on more materials, test series and counseling sessions, which the child takes on maybe not to his natural liking yet he joins in it out of sheer indifference.  Hope, he feels a hypocrite for even thinking the word.

I saw this happen maybe for a hundred times right before my eyes and the longer I observed greater was my dislike for such coaching centers which greedily attracts students under its tutelage just to break them mercilessly in the end.

This probably was one of the many reasons I dropped out of coaching classes in spite of threats, protests and laments from my parents. Guess I was after all right in what I did.

Note:- I have nothing against coaching centers as such. Some of them and maybe certain branches of the famous ones are really good. My advice here is not to encourage anyone to stop attending coaching classes but to tell them make sure you attend one when you have a clear idea about how to take an advantage of the guidance provided and the system.

Secondly, generalizing the student as a “he” may make you feel like I am gender biased or maybe that girls are spared of a similar fate, but both the beliefs should be dismissed because my experiences had been with a majority of male friends in this regard that’s why I used a “he”. 

Tick-Tock and yet another day goes by

“What do you know about Time?”

“Nothing” after a pause “Nothing at all” said the dark black statue, even though nobody spoke to him.

A handiwork of Gilbert Bayes in an attempt to immortalize a great man with an even greater vision, who till date clutches the IISc main building close to his chest of fear that even the tiniest of negligence on his part be responsible for Swami Vivekananda turning restlessly in his grave. Of all the ones in the campus, I pity him the most, for he stays there during sun and rain under heat and cold, of all these agonies the worst being the one pervaded by the crows, pigeons and any other kind of bird that have more right than us to call IISc a home.

As someone who stood there counting probably over every single second of his century long existence, yet no one could have a sound sleep after prefixing upon him a blame for knowing “nothing at all” of Time. Time, which according to Albert Einstein subjected its flow whether you lay your hand on a hot frying pan or on a hot woman, had by far shown no mercy at all as it ticks away busily exposing the limit of our very mere existence.  

The complex equations on pen and paper, for elucidating the anonymity of time does no justice in explaining to me how quickly time has gone by. It seems just like yesterday I had my first class and was easily cruising through Newton’s reckonings and here I am today struggling to understand the abstruse mathematics behind a counter-intuitive world of Quantum physics and still wondering where the past two years have vanished, and by now I also have the misfortune of being in possession of average grades of my four semesters which will hold little value in Ivy league if not for a research paper soon to come. And according to some, my continuous dedication to my blog may as well get me admission in Ivy League but for some degree in English!! After all that Physics!!

The serenity of the campus has probably veiled the restless timepiece that seems to govern everyone, an inevitable passage of a precious quantity never reclaimable, as our mind and body races between assignments, classes, lectures, research or maybe a talk by some Nobel Laureate who happens to join us from time to time.

The worst part of the day happens to be the time between bed and sleep, when the past comes back with a vengeance- the mistakes, the misery, the could-haves and should-haves. Try as you might, you simply cannot close your eyes and go to sleep.  That’s when I ask myself, how was all of my time spent today, was it the lectures? Or was it the endless assignments? Or was it the leisurely walk I went on holding some girl’s hand? Or was it the demands of a healthy investment in a long distance relationship?

And at that time you simply wished you could stop the clock for some time and take it all in and then probably resume it, for yet day another had gone by.

 
Photo credits: Abhinav Maurya
For more Abhinav Maurya snaps:Click Here