NOT
TAKEN
same road as I had. “What had they done
differently?”, I wondered, “They’re just
bigger nerds”, I tried to assuage my perturbed soul. I guess that’s the thing with
change, you convince yourself that things
will get better and sometimes they do, and
you feel proud of the choices you made;
but sometimes they don’t. It didn’t in my
case. One month down the line things still
hadn’t gotten better. Frantically searching
for some perspective, I started talking to
seniors who had made it big, looking for
reasons to convince myself that I had made
the right choice. The soothing words of my
seniors offered but a brief respite from the
tempestuous doubts brewing in my mind.
They all came flooding back at the end of
3rd semester when I was waiting to board a
bus back to Bangalore at the bus-stop:
Friend: Dude you must be acing EEE!
How much this sem?
Me: Not great man. 8.0 something
(not)Friend(anymore): What?! That’s
one hell of a drop, from 9.6 something to
8. You should have stayed with civil man or
taken anything but EEE.
At the time of making a decision,
of choosing a path, you can look at your
choices and analyse it to your heart’s content, but you get to know where it’s going
to lead only once you’ve embarked on that
journey along one of the paths. The path
that I had taken looked bleak ahead and
there was no going back.
Had I made the right choice? I didn’t
want to know the answer.
By the end of 4th semester, the situation had turned even more dire. I was now
touching the higher spectra of 7 SGPA.
Back home there were those long conver-
sations with my parents about why
I was so consistently inconsistent.
My mother even asked me if I had
a girlfriend in college. I wished the
answer to that was yes, because I had
no other excuse for my performance
going down and hence nothing to
end the seemingly unceasing conversations.
Time flew at breakneck speed
and I found myself stepping into
third year. It had been a year in EEE and
I had decided to live with the choice I had
made. Even though nothing had gone right
so far, I was still determined to make my
decision count. There was still a ‘trickle’ of
hope. And so, instead of dwelling in the
past or worrying about the future, I decided to live in the present and looked at
exploring every opportunity that presented
itself. This gave me a new perspective on
things. I realized that my way of judging
the decision as right/wrong or good/bad
was flawed. My judgment was limited to my
ability or inability to get AAs and ABs. The
pressure of scoring good grades is known
to be an important driving factor for most
of us to study. In the process we might end
up studying, but not learning upto our full
potential. But, it is the moment when you
apply the knowledge to come up with an
idea and build and create something on
your own when you get the satisfaction of
having learnt something. This is precisely
what happened to me. A project that my
friends and I were working on took off. We
won prizes galore, were called to different
places to present our idea, and eventually
landed an amazing internship. Soon I was
developing a scoreboard-cum-timer for
SlamDunk, Incident ‘13. Everything began
to fall in place slowly but steadily. I may not
have scored very high grades in the courses
that I took up, but that surely wasn’t an
indicator of my interest in the courses. I
began to enjoy the challenges that came
up, looking at each obstacle as a chance to
jump higher and reach out to a new level.
To sum up, my life in EEE had been
more or less like a boxing match - I kept getting hit every time I tried to settle down. But
I guess that’s what set it apart from the rest.
In life, it’s not always about how hard you can
punch but about how hard a punch you can
take.
So here’s the thing about decisions that
we make: as long as everything is going
smooth on the path you’ve taken, it seems
to be the right decision. But as and when you
face an obstacle, you look back at the time
where you had a choice and v