My first year at College

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While it’s been nearly a year and half when I concluded my very first year at the college wherein I entered the byzantine world of uncertainty and to some extent; the rat race of competition. Though I had already written a farewell note for my first year in the long-vacations following that year but was quite cynical about putting it here on the WordPress, it was just a little while back when I finally started a deep retrospection of what I did, learned, and missed in my first year at my college and thought of sharing an epitome of that with you all.

And the story must start with I coming back from Rashtriya Military School Chail after completing my seven year course in 2016 with the compunction of pushing myself into the ditch of fiasco for not been able to clear the written examination of National Defence Academy, and with all surety I can vouch for the failure due to I being too insouciant and lacking focus in studies. And the reason for I being gravely indifferent was my disinclination towards defense services that was a result of my proximity to the internet where I surfed many sites, blogs, etc and expanded my horizons in multiple dimensions. And perhaps due to this propensity of I to learn more and more, for the first time in my life I realized how wonderful the world is with an uncountable number of cultures,

political regimes, different and sometimes weird food habits, etc etc. This proselytized me for a career where I could satiate my lust for traveling and tasting the cultures of different parts of the world and simultaneously be off service to my nation in the best traditions.

So in the autumn of 2016 I came back home and foolishly took JEE-Mains examination only to face the fiasco again and in the meantime, my senior secondary board examination result also came where I just managed to score that much, that would at least get me into the best college of Jammu University, where I haphazardly started with Bachelor in Computer Applications stream and with that I formally started my higher education. While all this time I was happy for my worthy comrades who were joining National Defence Academy and at the same time felt quite disconcerted for not been able to join them. For whatever reasons, I realized that the fault is within myself and this is the high time I weld those faults and prove myself.

After being jostled by mind-wrenching no-hopers in the past I was overly zealous to acclaim myself in extra-curricular activities and academics that I was not able to do while being at school partly due to my foolishness and partly due to opportunity paralysis. In college, I brought some inherited qualities from my school like good communication skills, dress code, discipline, etc which helped me in making a good rapport with my teachers. Though these were the same qualities that I lacked before, but due to some orphic happening, I was able to consolidate them into my personality and gradually augmented them and my hard work paid when I scored ranks in my very first semester, but still was not satisfied with my approach so I started reading books with a particular dilection for non-fiction genre and to my great astonishment, I found myself loving books and gradually filled a whole section of book rack with fiction and non-fiction by different authors.

By the second semester, I took a very important decision for my career and that was registering myself with the coaching institute mentoring students for Civil Services Examination and formally started my preparations for Indian Foreign Service for which I had thought of during my school days. Meanwhile, I was doing great in my college academics and fortunately topped again in the second semester.

Now when I look back at the time that tested me I feel that even after doing quite commendable work I cannot deem myself as the kind of person I want to be, and it’s quite ironic that I faced failures, got-up, worked hard and was paid for the candles that I burned on both the ends, but still I sometimes think I could have done a lot better had I followed a time and space-based approach and ironically this makes me blissful because I want to codify what Indra Nooyi said, into my mind permanently;

“Never feel happy about what you know”

I really and seriously don’t want to stretch it too long, but I think sometimes peer pressure, family pressure do help in getting things done, the caveat here is that it should not become a perpetual adoration for the mind because balancing the fulcrum between minuscule stress and inordinate depression is extremely hard. I was fortunate enough to balance that for past one year with the help of my family members and new friends from my college.

I’ll have to end it here quite abruptly, but please ping up for follow-ups