A Head Full of Dreams
I talk a lot but I don’t write a lot. I’ve been told that by a lot of my friends over time. I guess I never get the motivation enough to make me write and keep me at it until I’m done. Here’s a piece for those who’ve wanted me to write. Sorry if the topic is too dark or too maligned but I’ve tried to infuse it with as much optimism and a sense of direction as I could. People from Kharagpur would relate more to this than anyone else.
The first part is a personal account and the second part is a rant-ish discussion but I request you, the reader, to read both with an open mind and if you still have some issues with it, I’d love to hear your views in the comments section. Even if you don’t have issues and want to let me know your thoughts, feel free.
Day -1365:
Excited, ecstatic, confused, scared, optimistic. These are just a few words that describe my feelings as I stood on that platform with my dad and mom, waiting for the train to start. Waiting for the next chapter of my life to begin. The Days before -1365 were the days gone by, of mistakes and achievements I wasn’t bringing along with me. I wanted to win the world over, no idea how. And I wanted to meet KGP, who was still Kharagpur as of then. On the platform, there were hundred others, all lost in their own world and tiny bubble of aspirations. What did they want from Kharagpur? No Idea.
They were certainly not alone. We were all a thousand shining faces, lost in our thousand uncomfortable musings. On the shoulders of us all, a head full of dreams.
That train journey is still so blurry to this date. The only point at which I remember the haze lifting was when that Ambassador got down from the bridge and I saw Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur etched in stone. We entered and immediately the trees told me, ‘Welcome to Paradise’. The trees seemed to tell me, ‘We’ve grown so much over the years, just so that today you could pass under us, hoping to find a place for yourself beyond us.’ I couldn’t sleep that first night after that. I stayed awake, waiting for Dad to fall asleep so that I could go and start roaming this place on my own, to get lost in it. And the moment he did? I took my steps towards the corridors, onto the staircases and as soon as I reached the exit gate, I stopped. Those trees looked forbidding now. I had no idea what to do and where to go. KGP was better from that car, I didn’t think I was ready for it just yet. That entire night, I just roamed around in my corridors, trying to figure out what this place was, what it could be and what it’d do to me.
At that time, I vowed to myself that I won’t say a clear NO to anything, at least without justification to myself. This story hasn’t even started and if there was one thing I didn’t want to be, it was a NO. How naive I was.
Day -1265:
This is when I come to realize that I’ve never been so unprepared for exams in my life and at the same time, I’ve never been so comfortable with it. They’d lost their strength. KGP had started its lessons. This is not the first lesson it gave, but it is the one I remember right now.
Day -1231:
My first birthday is another blur, between the GPLs and the hugs. It also told me that I haven’t found the best of people and meetings I’d get from KGP just yet. We still have a-ways to go.
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Now, let’s go forward in time, under these same trees who’ve seen decades and decades rush past below them.
Day -501:
I’m not that naive first year anymore. I have authority and an understanding of what to do with it. I think I’m intelligent but I don’t have an internship yet. FML. This birthday, I’m sitting with just one friend drinking coffee while I get calls from the 20 others who couldn’t stay in the holidays this time around. This isn’t an issue for me but my friend insists that I shouldn’t be alone on my birthday. I could tell her that I’m not, that I have KGP with me. My friends are what has spread the web of my support through out KGP. In my first year, it was the hall, then the class, then the societies and then further on, until I realized that the web of support needed a strong, deep center or else it would pull itself at the seams and I’d lose the entire web. Now, at this moment in time, I have the strong center I’d always wished for, not that I might have deserved it, but they are just the people who stuck around nevertheless. I can hear about suicides in KGP and all I can feel is that they didn’t have that web to hold them in place. They didn’t have someone to hold them back and change their view, to force them to look where they didn’t see any light and show them the options that could exist. However, I digress. KGP was yet to give me its biggest lesson in Ups and Downs yet.
Day -451:
Well, from having no internship to having almost two the next moment is a surreal feeling. I guess all my dark worries regarding this would’ve been really easier to handle had I just had a peek at the future. Where’s a time machine when you need it? That is another thing I’m miffed about. The logician in me knows Einstein shut everyone up regarding Time Travel but the Dreamer still wishes for an FTL jump to be able to make any change possible. To get that UNDO button. To get another shot at everything, if not for me, for others, for the ones who I don’t know it yet, but who need it more than I do.
Day -217:
I feel old now. In KGP time, I’ve lived three generations and I’m starting my fourth. KGP’s old mystic charm has been tempered now but I still listen to this when I enter the gates of the campus on returning from home:
A lot of my friends are leaving the campus in 9 months and I’m not sure if I feel happy for them or happy of the fact that I still have friends who won’t be leaving. Because now, that web has grown and solidified somehow. There are new spiders in those trees, joining with my web but now my web has stopped growing as much and it just accepts. The trees? It took me a long time to see but there were always older webs here. The canopy I’d seen on Day -1365 was just a small part of the whole show, the whole point of the Paradise. I didn’t realize that I was joining in with them too, more so than they were joining in with me. Now? In every spider on every branch, I see some part and form of myself struggling to find my place. I feel like a grandfather and explain to them to just let things be, to live without worrying about where you’re going, and to just have the empathy to connect, because this forest is large enough to accommodate everyone, with all the different types of webs they have. These webs have formed over numerous hours, over numerous occasions and numerous situations, be them the pressurising OP situations or the Illu preparations or your GC Event practices or even your dept assignment submissions or your Grand Viva preparations. They are not just your batch-mates, or your hall-mates or your society-mates, they are what your KGP is to you. A web, over, around and through the trees, supporting you to help you become strong for the world outside. Because the webs will go beyond this forest one day.
Day 0:
I have 380 more days left in the campus and I’ve seen yet another spider fall today. The canopy looks extremely dark, especially to those who had to deal with a harrowingly dirty election season here just before this. Couple that with the general trend of insensitivity in the world, this place can amplify that darkness very easily. This one probably knew he needed help but he didn’t know how to get it. This time, I’m just hit with the momentary shock, and the eventuality of it hits once more. I realise that we never notice because we never knew what to notice, and in this case, because I never knew what made him tick and what brought him down. We all had very vague dreams of what we wished to achieve and those dreams morphed and solidified into something that defined us and our efforts as we leave this place. However, that is a very idealistic line to say, since there are people who have no idea where they’re going in life or even if they do, they’re not happy with it especially compared to the aspirations and expectations from their loved ones they’ve dealt with through the years. There will be others who are dealing with different vices and issues which are as diverse in their own nature as things can be, but the end result is still the same state of mind, just with different triggers. I guess, this head full of dreams is just where we’ve gotten stuck. A senior I look up to, once said to me:
Happiness = Achievement -Expectation
I have seen it play out so much once I started thinking about it that I don’t know if this cycle has ever stopped, right from my childhood. I can only say that this place gave me my web of support to deal with whatever came along in however best a manner I could. I have more thoughts beyond this but I’m scared that I’m taking too much of the reader’s time so I’ll stop my musings and get down to some hard, direct business.
Day +1 :
Unknown, but hopefully something good will turn out of it.
For those who are reading this, who are the ones whose dreams are not supported by the web of people that this place should’ve provided them with, know this that there are people who are willing to help. If you are finding it difficult to ask for it verbally, do it in some other fashion. Want to talk to someone anonymously? Drop in a letter below their door and ask for a response at some other place. Go to your mentors to talk, or if they’re useless, go and talk to someone you look up to. Talk to that professor you like or the faculty advisor you got. Go to the counselling center if you see no option. Feeling ashamed and scared pushed you into this corner and shame is never great enough to measure to someone’s life. Make a fake fb account and message the people on FB who you’ve seen are the ones you want to ask for help from and ask. Drop them a mail! Do something, anything, other than just looking at that rope or that fan or that knife.
I can only remember Dumbledore’s wise words in closing, ‘ Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.’
We are right next to a village with a train feeding us in and our lives confined to the mysteries of this place. KGP is my Hogwarts, so I urge you to make yourself the Wizard of your destiny. Please.
To all those who are reading this and think they can help others join the web or want to help, go ahead and read the rest, since it is mostly just a rant consisting of some musings I’ve had over time and some solutions I can think of, which I’ll definitely try to pursue after my exams.
And now further:
<rant-ish>
As an editor of The Scholars’ Avenue, I’ve had an opportunity to interact with the very influential people at the top of the structure and the first thing that comes out of such discussions with the admin has been the fact that there is a disconnect with which they perceive the student dynamic in the campus and as a result the measures they choose often take the methods which will have the least proactiveness.
Support of my View-Point: KGP Happiness Survey
Everyone wants to improve the situation, but it won’t come out of facebook posts regarding how harmful this is for the person contemplating it or how it will just harm their small little world with the people they consider important.
All I can see is that they anyway see no point of this support system, since they’re the spiders who’ve lost their web, or were never able to form the stronger webs. Reminding them of the people close to them? That is going to remind them of the people they think they’re letting down everyday. Asking them to ask for help? Who do they ask? How do they judge who is the right person? Because let’s say you ask the wrong person for help and you hear exactly something that you shouldn’t have, since the person never knew how to help you in the first place. I realize at this point that people might not agree with me and say that if it is able to save a life, it is better than nothing, and I agree. People should always be willing to talk, not just for their own goals but also as general concern for fellow human beings. However, people might have the view that routine is all they need in life, a routine of doing things and not getting stuck in their own heads and maybe talking will help, but it isn’t a one size fits all situation in the end. Again, I digress, but let’s move on.
Isn’t support the point of the thought-to-be-useless Counselling Center, to provide ‘able’ mental support and guidance? For all the stories we hear about how it wasn’t able to work for people, we’re never going to be hearing about the stories in which it did. The point of talking to your friends is just to provide another opportunity for that one strand of connection to form which might be the difference between survival and free fall.
A Counselling Center and a Counselor, as the name itself is a very forbidding prospect for most people. People raise this point of the Counselling Center being in the center of the campus is one reason why more people don’t go, since it is so visible. On the other hand, in a chat with the head of the Counselling Center, Mrs. Sangeeta Das Bhattacharya raised a counter point, of people who actually came to the center saying that it was so close to every place that people entered before their own minds told them to refuse to go in there. It is not as simple as a location issue is what this tells us.
The reasons why people think of taking this drastic step are varied, and not all of them can be simplified to a ‘Talk and you’ll get help and you’ll solve this’. It is a medical condition with some causal vectors and some clear medically defined courses of improvement. It all starts however, with talking to someone, and a Counselor is a last course of action for many since the institute is getting involved and that makes the people scared about getting their parents and close ones involved at some stage in this which is exactly what they didn’t want and why they were alone. Moreover, there are 4 counselors for a campus of over 11,000 when research(Check the citations on the wikipedia page for exact research) suggests that a ratio of 1:1000 should be the case and every student should get multiple sessions.
So what do we need?
First and foremost, a support cycle consisting of students. SWG had an initiative called the GateKeeper’s Programme in conjunction with the Counselling Center, which had to be changed to a Wing Co-ordinator because there was no interested response from the students.
Then, we need a student hotline, using these students using some tollfree switchboard for the campus, with a police helpline and medical helpline directly in conjunction with it. This will need a regular feedback and review system to ensure quality.
An idea that I have that needs a lot of work implementing is that like, Science of Happiness, Gatekeeper’s Program should be a course, maybe a micro-credit course for the interested people and those who complete it successfully should be given the option of joining the Student Helpline. Maybe we could get those Wing Co-ordinators to take part in it, because as of now, they have no idea what they are or should be looking for<Weird farfetched ideas, I know!>
Most of all, however, we need the institute to understand our situation and agree in spirit to the idea of a better support system than the one in place, which is to go to the Counselling Center which is already overburdened and increasingly ineffective, as events are suggesting.
Perhaps, all we need is a little bright light in the world to shine to show that there is hope yet.
With that note, I’ll leave with a set of links to uplift the mood:
SWG Form Link asking for Wing Co-ordinators
</rant-ish>
P.S: Thank You, reader, for sticking with me till here. Here you go, for a direction to a happier place.
