College: Deciphering the journey

With dreams rocketing to the sky, with a million doubts stationed above the head, entering into a college equates itself to the feeling that one has when she/he is just about to go on a roller-coaster ride; an experience no different for a nerd to a typical college made student. It is the time when reality refuses to seep through the brain, masked by all those fantasies painted by cinema about the new league.

All surreal preconceptions soon travel the myth-reality gradient path and the discovery is often different from that thought to be. First year of college is a time when all the gift wrapped doubts are waiting to be tore open to show its pleasant, ugly and boring expressions. It is the dawn of the time when the sun rises to see your eyes wide shut beneath several layers of laziness floating in a fresh air of freedom. The new air pushes one into a maze of endless attitudes, and the road taken eventually will determine whether he/she looks good or ugly under the lens of the system, friends, family and the Nazi styled society (The fuhrer's legacy isn’t dead!). The battle begins even before your retinas can seize the scenario and trust me, the Hector’s, the Achilles’ are only limited stock commodities in the campus arena. Reality starts to set in and everything seems so dramatic and hyper-real; cell phones, debit cards are the new gods of worship. Every single movie released is treated on par with a product of Nolan or Spielberg and guaranteed a visit to the screens; when even Marconi will be made proud of for putting his invention “radio” to the maximum use; when irrational jingoism in the name of sport is at its zenith; when self-centric actions begin to fade into oblivion and parochial attitudes are trashed.

Just when people begin to find their feet on the ground, the Earth would be found gasping for its breath after completing one revolution round the sun. People start to get accustom
ed to each other- knowing and finding peers of same or different wavelength, which perhaps is the most challenging and deciding parameter of what an “experience memory” will reveal four years later. Clocks are the most “unsympathetic” objects in college – they freeze when the sound waves within the walls of a room is filled with pathetic technical jargon and move faster than light when there are smiles, mock , and fun around in the air- which happens by default when there is a gang of jobless undergrads around. When you think you know the people around you fairly well, the clock at that exact moment mercilessly shifts the last digit of the year by a factor of three and you find yourself in the final year of college.

Years of planning and setting goals for life starting from kindergarten, culminates to this exact point when they must be materialized; when failure is not an option and future “lifelines” are believed to be ostensibly non-existent; when hopes and fears of the genetically associated people are higher than your highest GPA. Amidst the fears of what life looks beyond the boundaries of the
time in college, the jobless undergrads don’t give up in what they do best- sleeping with eyes wide open, swearing without even an ounce of guilt, mocking friends incessantly, confusing even the automated bank machines on what the minimum balance amount is, waking up to start the day by late afternoon, letting the laptop batteries literally to melt out of heat, looking at the dictionary to check what the word “PROJECT” means, and making sure the online status never changes from “veti”. A great paradox presents itself at this crucial juncture. There is the willingness to be stagnant and to cling on to this most exquisite chapter of life, but the pragmatic domain of the brain knows that the unsympathetic clocks will simply refuse to stop working. However, this challenge also presents itself the opportunity to register great moments in the short time to follow in the “experience memory”.

The enigma called “College” presents a world for four years without defining or letting us predict the start and finish points, just as this author is flummoxed to paint in words totally about this complex chapter of life. Any chapter that begins flips eventually towards the last page, but the experience reading the pages defines how the pages will be bookmarked in the memory. A new chapter and a new journey awaits!