My Third Year at IIT-K : The Memoirs (Part I)

Recently, my third year at IIT Kanpur came to an end. Of the three years I’ve spent here, this undoubtedly was the most enriching and exciting one. It taught me valuable lessons about life and helped me grow as a person.

I write this blog for two reasons: first, it will act as a memoir for me years hence when these memories will start hazing out and second, it will help my friends who have been part of these amazing moments to relive them whenever they want.

So, if you’re neither me nor a friend, you should probably stop reading this. This would be absolutely useless to you.

If not, keep reading.

I’ll break my third year in two parts (one for each semester) and each part in certain chapters.

So here goes Semester V

Chapter I: The Internship

Semester V, I believe, is a very important semester of one’s undergraduate life. This is the first time you realize that things are starting to get serious, that watching FRIENDS all day and playing FIFA without halt can only make you so much happy, that it’s time to start looking towards the feared and the inevitable, that adulthood is almost there and you need to choose your career path. Or so they say.

I wanted to elaborate on the whole internship thing but then I realized that it can be another blog in itself. So I’ll be leaving the details out right now (if some of you want, I can write another one concerning just my internship experience) but long story short: I got the very internship that I’d aimed for during the summers, a day 0 company with the right blend of core and non-core- Hindustan Unilever Ltd.

Now this might sound cliched but believe me, I was sure that I won’t make it to HUL after my interview. I called my dad and in a disheartened voice told him “Isme nahi hoga, I’ll do better next time”. He gave me his routine dad-pep-talk and buoyed me up. I couldn’t sleep that night, true story.

But yeah, I made it and this made my day, no month, no at least a semester.
( I know this might sounds like an overreaction but only when you go through this emotion of being sure of a rejection and then get selected will you know what I mean.)

By the way, I’ll be joining HUL as an intern this summer in their coffee plant in Hosur.

Chapter 2: The Post-Intern Chill

After the internship period was over for me on the very first day, I inadvertently became quite laid back for some days. I slacked off academically and even on other fronts. This led to some pretty shitty mid-sems (which are always my saving grace btw) and forced me to drop a course that I really liked (I couldn’t afford a D). Luckily for me, this made me see that there’s a good chance that the transcript of this semester might be an embarrassment. I did pull up my socks, but not before a plethora of treats.

Well, my wing has a very strong culture of celebrating birthdays and extracting treats out of ’em all. This is one thing that I really admire. Treats, I think, are really good little escapes from the routine campus lives and importantly, the similar bland food of campus. Have you ever noticed how the food of each canteen is so remarkably similar?

Chapter III: Vox Walks/Walked away :’(

Being chilled out comes with its own perks. You get many ideas and have a good amount of time to implement them.

For a long time I wanted to start a photo-journalistic venture on campus but somehow, I did not do much about it. But one fine day, while BPST, Saarthak and I were walking towards Hall-IV, this stupid pun that “Would us moving together count as Vox Walks?” struck and this was the perfect push to pursue my venture. This pun. Oh God, I was so proud of myself. (Yeah, judge me all you want, but I looooove puns)

And hence started Vox Walks. BPST suggested that I make a teaser about it to create some buzz on the campus. Well, Vikram and I did make a teaser and it did create a little buzz. But what buzzed around more was my to-be-mocked-for-life-head-turn at the 22nd second. Yeah, go ahead. My treat.

Vox Walks was received quite well. If you haven’t seen any post, search Fb for #voxwalks. *subtle promotion, eh? xD*

Meanwhile, it was also the last semester for one of my best friends on campus, the big daddy Samarth Bansal. He has inspired many and I’m one of them. I respect him and love him and admire him. He did some awesome work in Vox in his last semester. Every article he wrote was another hit on the Vox page. He also threw an awesome DJ party at the Highway Restaurant (in which ACs were dearly missed :P)

Chapter IV: The Fests

Saarthak and I went to Rendezvous’15 (cultural festival of IIT-D) because both of us had our own motives: I wanted to meet my school friends and he wanted to, well, meet my to-be-bhabhiji. Turned out, Rendezvous was such a disappointment that we left within 2 hours but only after seeing Balwant’s play, had no option! We did meet a Bernadette-from-TBBT look-a-like but later realized this, too, was a disappointment.

Later Prabhjyot, Balwant and I had the best sleepover ever at Samridhi’s place, thanks to her brother. We talked of conspiracy theories, of illuminati, built an awesome poker arena and fake money, sung songs and planned to go to India Gate in the early morning. Only that as soon as we lay on the bed, we dozed off and woke up in the noon.

In this whole trip, Rendezvous was not the biggest disappointment. Screwing up a planned lunch was :|

Only about 10 days later, Balwant and Samridhi came to participate in Antaragni’15 and again we had a hell of a time! Sure, I screwed up a quiz, was denied usage of my own belongings and yet disappointed them at times but yeah, it was fun. My IIT-K friends and school friends bonded very well, ermm, over making fun of me but we savored our time together and it did make up for the weirdish feeling that I was going through due to Antaragni not being held in Old SAC.

Also, Samarth gave us another awesome treat, one where both alcohol and secrets were spilling all over!

Chapter V: The D-Day

Diwali is probably the most important festival for Hindus: a festival of lights that dispels darkness and brings positivity and hope. So, as is the custom, I decided to don a good-boy look on Diwali. I went from a looking like a bearded vagabond to a clean shaven transvestite.

I thought this was a huge mistake and that I ruined my Diwali but this was the furthest I could be from the truth. It was in fact, the best Diwali ever. 
Why?
May be some other day.

Chapter VI: The straight 8s

I’ve more or less been a consistent performer academically and have somehow managed an eight every semester without fail. But semester 5 was poised to break that streak. Not studying the entire semester, topped with the fact that endsems were just a week from my on-boarding a certain board, I was pretty scared of them being a disaster. But thankfully, the semester was easier than I’d thought, and more so after dropping a course. It was a semester where I had signed up for only about 40 credits and thanks to the pre-endsem week intense toil, the straight 8 thing did not break.

In fact, I got my highest SPI that sem. (Summers not included)

Chapter VII: A bittersweet Bithoor

Post end-sem, some of us friends planned to visit Bithoor on cycles because one-it is an unsaid custom that every student of IIT-K needs to visit Bithoor on cycle at least once and second-that we really wanted to go somewhere after the culmination of end-sems.

The cycle trip was amazing. We went at our own pace. Stopped at various points. It was a cold morning so we stopped at a village and had steamy cups of tea and rusks. We did a boat trip in Ganga and everything was going awesome.

While returning, there was this very steep road that we had to go downhill on. We did. And it was so much fun. So, we went again but this time, it was not fun. Rohit braked his cycle suddenly and fell really bad. He lost 6 teeth and was bleeding profusely. We were all too shocked to do anything but somehow managed to take him to the nearest Hospital.

Luckily, there was no injury to his head and he got fine within a month. He now has a new set of shiny teeth, for which we really take his case :P

Ending remarks

On the whole semester V was very enlightening. From the resume making and internship process teaching me how to persevere and be patient to the Bithoor incident teaching me the importance of having friends to share your pain with, to seeing an important part of my campus life leave to seeing another important part becoming closer to me than ever, semester V was really a teacher.

But semester VI was no less of a teacher. Part II to follow soon.

Adios.