Adios IIT (BHU)

2nd August, 2016, 9:50 am

I rolled towards my left saw my roommate walk towards the door. “Class”, he sighed. I tried to muster the energy to jump out of bed and rush to class in the 10 min routine I had perfected in the last three years, somehow I couldn’t do it that morning.

3 hours later

“102 degrees” the doctor kept the thermometer on the table as he begun scribbling on my health dairy. The human body did it before video’s on the Internet made it cool, getting viral. I wondered if Arunabh Kumar had fever the day he decided to call his venture The Viral Fever.

4: 35 pm

I woke up from the sleep marathon viral fever got your body into. The paracetamol had done its job, I could hear Ravi Shastri whisper “Just what the doctor ordered”

I rolled around my bed hoping to resume my sleep marathon before an incoming notification caught my attention.

I picked up my phone:”Pushbullet: IIT BHU TPO Updates” it read

Another one of those useless PPT’s I wondered.

For those of you who haven’t experienced the wrath of placement process, attending corporate PPT’s is like watching one of Donald Drumph’s speeches. Low attendance during PPT’s can lead to less or no offers from that company. Hence, the TPO is left with no option except to enforce a strict attendance policy during PPT’s.

I click on the notification PPO [SRIB]. I rush through the list hoping to find my name.

I switched from gfg to g2g.

— — — — — -

I arrived at IIT BHU bursting with pride. The days of toiling for JEE having borne fruit and I had achieved the result I had so desperately hoped for. My first impression of IIT BHU wasn’t entirely impressive. The rooms were congested, the mess food tasteless and the lectures sleepy.

JEE preparation stories follow the same “happily ever” cliché that romantic movies do (and yet I dumped the same cliché on my placement story). I didn’t take me a week in college to realize life here going to be far from from perfect.

Over the next few months the college grew on me. Being here and participating in various activities opened the world to me, all in a radius of a couple of kms.

If one thing, I have really learnt at IIT its being humbled. Being surrounded by people of extraordinary stature in every field. You accept mistakes. You realize you may be wrong. You accept that there are people within Campus, who are better than you, at anything you name. As a kid you want to eat ice cream and be superman like everyone else. It takes growing up to realize we are all unique, we all have different aspirations from life. And amongst all this you learn to be different.

What I’ll miss the most about being here is the plethora of activities you end up being a part of. You’re participating in the Tata Crucible Campus quiz one afternoon, spending the evening at the ghats, returning to your room work on your BTP. Waking up the next morning to play football at the C{o}lympics, spending the afternoon attending one the few classes you attend during your final semester, catch up with the latest episodes of your favorite TV show and spend the rest of the evening writing this article. And yet these are just the boring days with no fests or parties in sight.

I joined the media club within a month of joining college. With FMC into its first full year, the media club had less than half a dozen members. Our activities revolved around managing media relationships for fests and releasing newsletters from them. The media club was managed by Alok Kumar Singh, Prateek Sinha and Shaswat Tripathi. We deliberated on how the ideal college newspaper should be for some time and by October’2014 we ready with the first edition, which we released online. We couldn’t have asked for a better start to 2015, with the college agreeing to fund the printing expenses, and our most junior members elevating their writing to impressive standards and proposing novel and creative articles. Avirup Kundu, Prasanjan Mitra, Shivdeep Singh and Rashi Chandola have since been four pillars of the Quest. It’s been a pleasure to see the Quest team improve leaps and bounds very year. With this being the last edition of this academic session, I have no hesitation in declaring that the current team has proved itself to be the most creative and efficient team we’ve had. And of course I must thank the designers, who’ve completed the layout beautifully with often just a night’s time in hand.

You’ve all come to this college after a rigorous filtering process and if you approach something with sufficient perseverance, there are only a handful of things that’ll be out of bounds. You would never have the freedom and the opportunity to pursue your interest as this place does. Avoid the deadlock where you don’t pursue something you’re interested in just because you aren’t sufficiently good at it to start with. You might seem to be endlessly waiting for that intern or your CGPA might drop below that self-assigned acceptable level, but don’t stop believing in yourself. Keep fighting and I’ll all work out in the end. And don’t forget that thanks to the safety net we have, things can’t really get bad for us.