The next room in the hostel, Room 37, was populated by Aditya Balaraman and yours truly. When I started writing this series, I was not planning to write about myself. It was mainly because I thought it would be retarded to write about my first impression of myself. I have known myself for a very long time, and I don’t think too many people would be interested in hearing what I thought about the freedom of eating whenever I wanted, pooping wherever I wanted and still be considered adorable. In retrospect, I have revised this view. I am now going to take some time to effectively vilify myself using a more relevant timeframe, at least to show that I am not partial.
My late school life was what you would typically expect from an overly ambitious IIT-tuition going nerd who actually had no clue what any of that was about. My weekly time was chiefly occupied with just about managing to get through school and eighteen grueling hours of classes in extremely sweaty conditions, and hence I really did not have much time to introspect. But for once the adage that “If you work now, you can rest later,” worked, and all this work got me into NIT Trichy at least. I finally had the freedom to do nothing. And my impressions of hostel life had their effects on me.
A person keeps changing. My route on joining college was more akin to that of a novice programmer’s source code. If you don’t get it right at first, just label it version 1.0 and scrap most of the stuff later. I won’t be going into details, but suffice to say, I like it and that’s all that matters. And it was all so ‘cool’, Except for innate geekiness, an internet addiction and a hardcore-gaming habit. They are actually not very hard to get rid of, comprising a single step really – let go of the mouse.
Another interesting fact, which somehow complements the earlier impression (well maybe not, but I am going to say it anyway) - it was when I entered NITT that I actually tried my hand at writing. I wanted to write something that people would relate with, make them react, scream and cry. I should have gotten a job at Microsoft writing error messages. But I didn’t realize it at that point and that dream went down the drain.
I did finally manage to stop studying, at least until the night before the exam. And I learnt several valuable lessons by doing that - classes were the time to get my day’s quota of sleep, I could know nothing and pass and that much of my education would comprise of studying copies of other people’s notes and that as long as I had company to do all of this, staying idle is better than working. But everything you like is bad for you in some way, so I wouldn’t recommend trying any of these.
This regression was mostly because I was not good at just studying any more, and somehow acquired this habit, that if you do something, either you do it well or don’t do it at all. That’s probably one of the reasons I did not get into any team sports (apart from the ones on the computer). Or maybe it was because the closest I got to actually playing was as a stand-in goalie for the first year hockey team, where my entire role comprised of wearing a lot of padding and still managing to stand up.
I did start doing a lot of other good stuff though, and I finally cultivated an interest in physical activity. And the constant power-cuts, water-cuts, dust and insects, generally bad food and internet access or lack thereof didn’t faze me, or stop me from having fun. That part did lead to a lot of close shaves though - constantly getting by in all semesters, labs and projects. People would not believe it if I narrated how we got all of this stuff done, but it all worked out in the end. So all of this generally boosted my impression of myself, that I was much more capable than what I gave myself credit for. So I truly believe that hostel life has changed me in this aspect, maybe for the better.
Coming to the end of this post, I never really thought I could pull off something like this. My actual thought was that who would be interested in reading such drivel, the ramblings of a jobless guy about himself. But then again, what are friends for?
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