Random Talk : of Events and Perspectives

Three days ago both my mom and dad posted some information on their respective Facebook pages and the post grabbed a lot of attention. I will go about explaining the posts later, but before that I want to explain some of the events which occurred to me before and after my twelfth results. I am not explaining this because I am trying to validate my choices or because I am trying to explain why I made the choices that I did. My choices are my decisions and I believe I don’t have to explain myself to anyone. But I am doing this because the past few months have been pivotal in my life and I want to share them with you. I want to share the fact that while I post a lot about my achievements in life, how I got a press card or how I enjoyed myself in a movie, there are a lot of things which I don’t write about. Particularly about my failures and about the days where I felt very down trodden because I failed to achieve something. With that particularly long paragraph, let me begin a chronological list of events which happened in the past three months.

On April 1^st of 2016 my twelfth standard boards came to an end and I walked out of my last exam pretty confident that I had done well. Keep in mind that I know my limits and my definition of well was getting a score of above thousand. Between April 1^st and April 17^th my days were filled with preparations for my IIT Humanities entrance examination. IIT Humanities is a five years integrated course only available in IIT Madras. It combines the English, Social studies, Economics, History and Accounts in one stream over a course of five years allowing me to choose between Economics and English in my third year so that I will get a masters in that particular subject.

The course is highly exclusive with forty six seats out of which only twenty three are available for my caste after reservation. That meant out of the thirty to forty thousand kids writing from all over India, I had to get within the first twenty three ranks to get into it. I managed Sunday classes with my school all through my twelfth and even appeared second in my final mock test in my batch. I was quite confident with my chances and I walked out of the exam centre on the 17^th of April confident that I will get into IIT Madras.

The remainder of the days before my IIT Results on May 11^th was spent on four other entrance exams. The first one was for a three year Mass Communication and Journalism course in Amrita Coimbatore. My dad and I travelled to Coimbatore on the April 28^th and I wrote the entrance examination and attended an interview on the same day. I was selected immediately and they said that I could pay the fees before the end of May. On May 5^th I wrote two entrance exams. Both were for English and Foreign Languages University. One was for a BA Honors course in English at the Hyderabad campus and the other was for a five year course on Mass Communication and Journalism at the Shillong Campus. The English course had only forty seats and only twenty were available for me due to aforementioned reasons, and my chances at the Shillong campus were even less because there were only twenty seats and only ten were available to me.

It also didn’t help that there were marginally larger number of students writing this examination and I never believed I had the advantage because I was certain that I would get into IIT, so much so, that the only preparation I did was on my trip to the exam centre. I walked out of there knowing that if I did clear any one of those exams, it would be the one for BA Honors in English.

Finally the day came. May 11^th. I don’t remember this day extremely well not because it was the day my IIT results arrived, no, it was because it was the day I decided to sleep in late, and I was woken up to the news that I had not cleared the entrance exam. The rest of the day flew by with really big questions in my head. Until then I had been certain that I would crack IIT. Now that I knew that I hadn’t, I didn’t know what to do next, because every other entrance exam I had written after that, I knew that I had not done well.

My parents and I sat down and decided to look at alternatives. Loyola, Vivekananda and MCC were the three colleges we decided on that day. It didn’t matter that I didn’t clear IIT; I would pursue my passion for English through a different route. The only roadblock was that I needed my twelfth results to apply for all three of them. So we decided to wait. In the mean time, I wrote my entrance exam for 

Tata Institute of social sciences on May 14^th and took solace in the fact that from my batch in IIT class only one girl had cleared the exam.

Time passed and my twelfth results arrived. I decided that I wasn’t a good judge when it came to my performance when I got a grand total of 894. A completely respectable score, just one that would get me nowhere, or so many believed. I was not up to the DAV standard. I will not lie, my mom was disappointed and my dad was disappointed, even though he didn’t show it. Call it a son’s intuition or call it the fact that I was a pretty good judge of feelings and character; I knew that they were disappointed.

I don’t blame them; they had every right to be. But that didn’t mean that they didn’t stick by me. Other than one instance where they asked me if I wanted to look into engineering, they stood by my pursuit. I weighed my options; Amrita and a small chance at EFLU BA honors. Both of them weren’t even remotely reassuring, and so it began. I applied to eight colleges; MCC, Vivekananda, Loyola, Presidency, Pachayappas, DGS Vaishnav, MM Jain and Shiv Nadir University.

In many movies, the protagonist has a scene where he understands everything that is going on and has a moment of revelation. Sometimes it is the fact that he is part of a coup and other times it is as simple as him realizing he loved his best friend all along.

I experienced one such moment, where in I realized that I had no, and will have no, advantage in society because of what caste, religion and community I was born into. I was a Hindu, Brahmin and I was a part of the Forward Community. The only advantage I would have is the fact that I was part of a community which had a Forward in its name.  

This particular revelation happened when I was at Presidency College for counseling on May 30^th and I found out that I had the first mark in English. But I wasn’t the first one who was selected for counseling, rather there was someone who had scored only half of my marks, but he was first because of his community. I have no hatred towards the person because he had an advantage because of his community. I was just baffled that I will not be awarded the first place, even if I came first, because my great-great-great grandfather had not been a part of the oppressed in the society. If that is the way our government functioned, why aren’t the sons and grandsons of murders and rapists hanged?

But that is a different conversation altogether. They were ready to give me admission on the May 30^th, but I had to refuse because I had to take the chance on the spot and that meant that I couldn’t agree to any other College if they gave me a seat, even to one I wanted very badly. And so, I lost my chance at Presidency College.

In the following days I received no information from any of the colleges I applied to and time just seemed to enjoy crawling by. I waited, waited and waited. After some time, I waited some more. 

Finally, on June 10^th I got admission into Vivekananda. Since it looked like it was too late to get an admission into any other college, and also because it had been one of my first choices after IIT, I decided to take it. The circumstances surrounding my Vivekananda admission did nothing but second my opinion that I had no advantage because of my caste or community. Enough about that though.

The day I got my Vivekananda was the day I slept really well. But the fact that I had gotten my admission into Vivekananda was not the sole reason for my peaceful sleep. As soon as I walked out of Vivekananda I got a call from Loyola, DG Vaishnav, and Shiv Nadir saying that they had a seat for me, in my course of choice. In the following week every other college I had applied to, except MCC, said yes. I pondered about saying yes to Loyola, but they didn’t want to offer me BA English. They were only offering me Mass Communication and Journalism.

While I was tempted to take up the offer, I settled for Vivekananda because it was one of my first choices and because they were offering me a course which would offer me a choice for my PG without limiting my future options. Time passed and my attention turned to making my writing better and also getting an internship at a magazine. On April 28^th I achieved that particular goal of mine when I got an internship at The Forecast Front, a Delhi based magazine.

Finally, we arrive to my parents’ posts. On July 1^st 2016, I got a huge kicker. I had, out of the tens of thousands of people who had attempted the exam, scored a rank in the Top 10 all over India making it into EFLU in Shillong. I knew this was not because of luck. I had answered the questions I knew the answer to, and I had assumed that there will be hundreds who could answer the ones I didn’t know. Turns out, there weren’t. Turns out there were only eight more across all of India who could answer the questions I couldn’t. But, the thing is I wasn’t proud of myself because of what I had achieved that day. It didn’t matter that I was the only south Indian on the top ten rank holders.

What mattered was that, that evening when my parents hugged me and said good job, maybe, just maybe I had made up for some of their disappointments.

Now that I have addressed that part, what about my decision? Well, I decided to stay in Chennai and continue in Vivekananda. I know that I am basically giving up a golden opportunity, but I realized that sometimes you have to consider your situation before jumping at the golden opportunity. Here, at home, I am a student in a really good college with one of the best English departments in the state. I have a seat in Sanskrit college which will get me a degree it Sanskrit in two years. I am looking at learning French and maybe one other language.

I have an internship, and quite possibly a job lined up in a very prestigious magazine and most importantly I have an idea of what I am supposed to do next, even if it is a pretty vague one at the moment. I gave up in Shillong because that is a place which I know practically nothing about and moving there means that I will have to abandon everything I have built for myself here and start fresh.

Yes, this is one of those moments that I will look back on and wonder what if, but I am pretty sure, just like comic universes, it won’t become part of the main story-line. And with that, the story of this post comes to an end. I hope you liked it. Let me know your opinions, for everyone has one. Until next time;

Peace!!!