I was a choot in my first year. I still am a choot, in my fifth year. Somethings never change. A lot of things do.
Fifth year in IIT is the year to lay back, relax, sip a cup of life every morning (without sugar), and blow few drags of life, every evening. In your fifth year, you feel like a cross between a student and a Professor! At one moment you are acting as a teaching assistant (TA), sitting in classes checking class participation, and grading assignments of the students. At another instant you are the same good ol’ student attending the same good ol’ boring lectures. After having spent a little more than four years in the same institute (be it a institute of technology, numerology or sex), you know precisely how each and everything happens, and how so many other things don’t happen.
When you were good at something in your freshie years, rest were jealous of you. When you were good at something in your second year, some started talking about you, others started hearing about you. When you were still good at something in your third year, you were caught hold of and made to do those things by whoever could make you do them. And you did them! In your fourth year, you were of course taken for granted to be good and further teach and inspire many more to become as good as yourself.
Comes fifth year. An ‘o’ is dropped from the good. Yes, if you are still good in your fifth year, still working, and as enthusiastic about what you do as you had always been, you are no more considered good. You are tagged God! You are not supposed to go wrong. Freaky feeling, I tell you. Because you know, you have always been the same. Only the perceptions changed. Four years is a long time my friend (I love to believe I don’t have enemies).
I am happy I accepted to work for Shaastra, the last and final time. I had almost made my mind to quit and live a lone, quite and apparently happy life. But today, if you ask me, I don’t regret my decision. No, not because junta decided to drop that extra ‘o’. I am happy for the simple fact that I got to know and work with an entirely new set of people. But for Shaastra, I would never have got the chance to expand my sphere. Very few of my year-mates still live inside campus. I would have felt very alone and lonely, had I not been a part of Shaastra.
I can sense a small trace of sentiness somewhere inside me as I try hard to conclude this post. The time to bid adieu to insti is arriving. And it is arriving fast. In my fifth year, I finally realize that I have grown up to be a man who is ready to go out and not only face the world, but rule it. I carry with me, my strength. Let me go ahead and put a full stop right away. A strong decision indeed.