Mohitha Adira

“It was just like a relay race. I was running because someone handed me the baton. I was running because people were rooting for me. I was running because time was running out. In all that haste, I never stopped for a moment to think about why I was running. But I did know that I wanted the race to end.

It was as simple as that. I prepared for JEE because my sister did the same. My family told me that it was my dream. I believed them. And as a consequence, got a royal treatment for those two years. For a while, I even enjoyed the preparations, exams and results but after that, it became tortuous. My competitive spirit died somewhere along the line. When the race finally ended, I was rewarded with a few options. Most of them were immediately turned down by my father as there was not enough “scope” in these fields. I finally tried holding onto BITS Pilani Physics but I didn’t have answers to my father’s questions about jobs in this field

So there I was, standing in BITS Hyderabad campus, enrolled in a branch with “more job prospects”, Electronics and Communication. The first year rushed by in exploring college and hostel life. And after that, I felt clueless. At a time when everyone around me was focusing on their interests and crafting plans for their lives, I was oblivious to my own self and what I wanted. Right from class four, I was pigeonholed into becoming an IITian. And with the race over, I was confronted with this big void in my mind for the first time; something which always existed but I never recognized.

I started questioning myself — “Why am I even doing engineering?”. I started seeking refuge in my old hobby of arts and craft. I started bunking classes and spending time on sketching, painting on the walls of my room and cutting my clothes to modify them. I even tried saving money to buy a sewing machine to enroll myself in a distant fashion designing course. At that point, I was sure about one thing- I am not going to continue this engineering degree.

“You’ve prepared for this for two years, don’t give up now. You can pursue your arts parallelly”, one of my school friends advised me. I thought about my father. I thought about the questions he would ask. I thought about myself standing there without any answers. So I stayed. And now in retrospect, I am glad that I did.

At the end of fourth semester, we were supposed to do an internship. I got mine in Mumbai, which later proved to be the period of awakening in my life. In the busy streets and on the tranquil seashores of Mumbai, I realised that there is more to life than just studying and preparing for the future. I realised that I could actually finish my engineering degree and it still need not decide my future. I also realised that art and fashion were just my hobbies. I could not picture myself as a professional artist. So there I was sitting in my room one evening after work, again clueless, but in a much more exciting way.

The answers came in tiny 2D boxes — the so-called ‘‘black box’. Every time I would see one of them on the blackboard while my teacher would explain the circuits, I would only wonder about that box. What is in that box? What makes it work in this particular way? And just like that, I got an idea of what I wanted to do. Initially I thought that Material Science would answer these questions of mine but I looked at the coursework and I realised that it wasn’t exactly aligned with my interest. I got a better idea during my seventh semester, when I went to Delhi for my thesis project. I got introduced to Solid State Physics for the first time by working with a scanning tunneling microscope. Soon after my final semester, I got placed in a company in Bengaluru and decided to prepare for GATE while working. Only one thing was left- I had to convince my father. His only concern was that unlike my batch-mates in BITS, I wanted to do my masters in India, not somewhere abroad. For which I prepared the “Sharma Ji Ka Beta” method. As the topper of the 2014 batch of my college went to IISc to do his masters, my father finally agreed to let me prepare for the same. And after a year, here I am, a SST master’s student in IIST, exploring all the things which I had wished to learn!!”

- Mohitha Adira , M.Tech Solid State Technology, Batch of 2020 admissions.

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