5 Years 5 Flavors

YEAR 1 The First Taste of Freedom

Just out of 2 years rigorous preparation for IIT JEE the first taste of freedom brought many changes in my attitude and outlook of life. This was perhaps the time when I had most of my most bizarre & crazy adventures (which includes my 3 encounters with UP police but this is not the place for them , maybe i will write about them some other time ;D).

This was also the period when i believe i was the most impressionable and vulnerable and i feel myself lucky to have had some of the best people I have met till now to help me stay grounded. Just having qualified one of the toughest exam, coming from one of the conservative states and suddenly finding myself with the complete freedom to be able to do anything at all; i guess there was more chances I would have got terribly misdirected had it not been some firm guidance from our seniors and candid and sometimes even brutally frank opinions of my friends. This was also the year I learned the most about living alone.

The highlights of this year were - the initial ragging (yeah, that was fun too but maybe only because i am seeing it in hindsight ;P), the Talents Night (which was perhaps the best since many years and mostly because of an excellent play called Munna bhai in DPT and emergence of the golden phase of Music in DPT due to arrival of great singers like Shreyas Baxi, Summeet Sinha aka Mitwaa ;P and of course the singing sensation Pawan Tiwary aka Pondy ;)). The First Rave & The Cognizance in which we got a chance to organize events for the first time ( even though because of some events in my 2nd year I avoided all campus events in the future, I still believe these events were the most fun I had in DPT), the volleyball matches that we used to play late into the nights everyday, and also because of some excellent memories with K Block friends namely among them Hada, Hitlar, Bhattu, sattu, DJ, Ballu, Monty, Jhanwar, Lolli, Betiz, Baxi, Asthanaji and of course how can we forget the DON. Forgettable events were of course the classes which I will continue to forget for the next 4 years too .:P

YEAR 2 The First & hopefully FINAL Taste of Politics

The second year brought with it a major division which actually resulted in most of the misunderstandings with many people in the future and the resulting alienation that I imposed on myself from the 2nd year onwards. The division was the separation of the batches and corresponding classes between Paper & Pulp and Polymers. Earlier we already had groups based on buildings/blocs now we had an additional divisions based on branches.Although one can argue that this might have brought different blocks together but I believe it created more differences between the various groups. Earlier I at least had K block to fall on to but now I only had Hada and Jhanwar. Though I maintained excellent relations with DJ, Bhallu and Hitlar till the end but with others I became only a friendly acquaintance. On top of Campus Politics was introduced by certain individuals to make an attempt to earn some money of their own and this really put a lot of strain on the already fractured scene.For the first time there was campus elections, this trend still continues today and from what I have seen is the mother source of all campus politics. Although looking back I can now understand what was happening but then I somehow found myself being pulled between various groups which were only working towards furthering their own goals. During this phase notable positive phases for me were working as Editor of the Campus Magazine Renaissance and getting a foreign internship at Abu Dhabi where for the first time i did experimental research (since there no instruments until our 3rd year :P) and especially had some excellent friends with whom I am still in contact with. But on the whole the 2nd year can be said as an eye opener because i got to know the truth about many people who had influenced me in my first year.

YEAR 3 The Worst Year of DPT

If the 2nd year opened my eyes to campus politics the 3rd year was the time when politics was at its ugliest and I with my ideals of doing the right thing somehow got trapped in the mire too. The past year had taught us how devastating wrong people holding the various important campus posts could be so this was the year to fight back. We were all so fed up with politics that we were prepared to do anything to stop this certain group from getting the posts this time. And looking back I believe that in trying to attempt to stop campus politics we were involved in politics too and this phase created a lot of suspicion in our already fractionated batch. And even bad was that this had a even more terrible influence on our junior batches and this is a legacy we all could have done without. There was all sorts of politics this year, politics for campus and event posts, politics between branches and also politics in between branches for grades( This problem became even more acute in the final years, but the truth was i wasn't personally concerned about grades during this time so I didn't care about it much ). In fact this was the year which made differences between me and many of my most close friends. It would be easy for me to blame everything on various misunderstandings but I guess misunderstandings won't get aggravated much without some actual cause or fact so if given an opportunity I would like to undo a lot of things i was involved in during this year. But as I said I myself didn't fully understand the kind of results our actions would bring about so I can do now is to apologize for my actions in this year and only pray that maybe someday DPT will again go back to the days when we used to care more for our friends than useless posts and politics. But on the whole when the year ended I started to get the big picture about what was happening in the campus but by then there was nothing i could do so i made a decision that I would not participate in any campus activity in my remaining years at DPT. In way this decision helped me get more focus into my career which helped me in the longer run but more importantly i was free of a lot of stress, but still the damage was already done after this year I had only a handful of people I could truly call friends.

YEAR 4 The year of Rebirth

This was the year when for the first time I forgot about everything and started seeing what was happening with my grades. And what I saw really appalled me, although my grades were still above average but still i realized the disturbing reality of favoritism followed in IITs which left a very bad taste. This was the time I tried to refocus on improve my grades. But the deed was already done and the professors had formed their own opinion regarding me. And the worst things was that there was no way i could change their opinion. But still this year I became more aware of what I wanted to do in life? And this became more clear during the 4th year summers when i finally decided to go for higher studies and started preparing accordingly. But the 4th year would be marked by the phase when I again became focused and although it was no where near to the kind of focus I had during my IIT JEE preparations but still it was a definite improvement upon my wandering phase of the previous 3 years. But the 4th year also brought the farewell with most of my K block friends and this left me particularly alone since I mostly had spent my time until then with my paper and pulp friends. So on the whole the ending of the year resulting in the farewell of some of my best friends also resulted in me having studies as the only focus to fall back on.

YEAR 5 The year of Hopes & Farewells

The 5th year started really good for me with the first half bringing lots of success. I got scored very well in GRE and TOEFL and also got short listed through most of the first Campus companies, that I participated. This created a false pall of confidence which lulled me into a false sense of euphoria and thereby made me careless. This resulted in me making many vital mistakes in my PhD applications and this led into a terrible period of uncertainty for me. To say the brutal truth at one point of time I had no jobs and all my applications had got rejected so that you can imagine how it was for me. But having been through such a low earlier in my 3rd year had made me more mature and I started a rejuvenated effort to get an application which finally resulted in me getting a PhD offer at TU Darmstadt, Germany. But to summarize on the whole the final year went in getting all the various documentations and formalities done for the completion of our degree. But still we had some really excellent "bakar" sessions with my fellow polymerites as always and hopefullywe will have many more such sessions in future too.

I doubt anyone would care to read the article but as is my habit I would like keep a record of things that are most important for me and the 5 years at IIT were definitely among the best days of my life. I want to give my heartfelt thanks to all of my friends whom I met during my stay at IIT, without you these 5 years wouldn't mean anything at all. wow i didn't know i still had it in me to write such a lengthy article. Lastly as always......

KEEP SMILING FOREVER.