I guess it's time for a bit of retrospective introspection.
It's been two weeks since my batch mates from IISERM had their glorious graduation. I guess now would be a time to address that one question almost everyone I met in the last 5 years have been asking me, the million dollar question - Do I regret dropping out of IISER ?
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| Sorry for the weird eyed pic, it's the only one I have |
The short answer would be No, end of story good bye the end 😆
But I guess I can't just leave it at that can't I ?
True the past five years haven't been the most easy going. True I have no clue of what to do when I graduate my MS in a year from now. True my future looks bleak with the prospect of unemployment hanging over my head. And I will admit had I stayed back in IISER I would have gotten a much easier route to do a PhD abroad than from where I am standing now.
But for all it's worth I have no regrets about the decision I made to drop out 5 years ago. The first year was obviously the hardest to get through, having to stay at home doing practically nothing as I watched a year go by. But that one year that I spend alone taught me more than 12 years I spend before that in school. It taught me about a lot of the realities that one has to face in life.
It took courage to go back to the same course and college that I dropped to go to IISER the very next year. Before I quit iiser I had this aura about me with my exploits and triumphs during my time at LEO XIII, but once I quit iiser, that aura became to be that of the fool who quit iiser. I knew that I had to build up everything back from scratch when I joined college, and for a while most through my first year I thought I could never be that old person I was. That was my mistake, to try and be the old me again, because it was in college that I realized you need to change to adapt to the newer hurdles life throws at you. Through out most of my first year in college I was depressed thinking about my past exploits and the good old glory days that I forgot to enjoy what I had. Those few months I spent sulking in first year is something that I maybe regret now, maybe.
Then a series of events happened into the end of my final year that made me realize that I had to stop reliving the past and go out and write new adventures for myself. After that self realization there has been no looking back.
Now I don't wanna say I became the guy who I was before quitting iiser again - no no - Rather it was quite the opposite, I had started to change from that guy to the one I am now. What are those changes you may ask ? 5 years before when I quit iiser I was a conservative, homophobic, narrow minded, orthodox, male chauvinist with a serious ego problem. Over the past 5 years through very sincere effort I have become a liberal who is more open minded and tolerant and a team player. True I am in no way a perfect guy now either, but at least now I make sure to make a real effort to better myself at every opportunity when it presents itself.
I've also learned to not be all uber serious about everything as I was used to. In the process I think I've become a bit too lazy and laid back, which I do not know at the moment would be a problem or not going on. In my school days I never made snarky comments and was never sarcastic, now I'm very much the contrary of that. Eric Idle's song from Monty Python's 'Life of Brian' "Always look on the bright side of life" has kinda become my life's official motto.
Speaking of which something I'm glad that I picked up after quitting iiser is my love for film and learning about it's craft. I started watching films in this time because well, for one I didn't have anything else to do during that first year and also it helped me get my mind of my problems. As the years passed on I started watching films across various languages exposing myself to the aesthetics of film makers over various times and all over the globe so much so that one classmate in my MSc once jokingly called me CMDB (Cusat Movie Data Base). Now that's a nickname I can be proud of. During this time I was also able to write a treatment for a short film that a friend of mine directed based on a poem that I wrote. Which brings me to the biggest positive (I consider personally) to come in my college years.
The rise of me as a serious poet who the community started to take seriously was quite unprecedented now that I look back at it. I've always scribbled poetry since high school but I never took my works seriously I never thought they were any good, despite my friends saying they were nice. So when I won the versification competition at college and went on to participate in the University competition I didn't expect to win even in my wildest dreams. So imagine my extreme delight when I went on to win the competition which gave me an opportunity to come on AIR (All India Radio) for a half hour interview where I discussed my poetry and ideologies. I also went on to become a regular poet in AIR for the next 2 years. It was after that interview on AIR that I started to write this blog. Something I doubt would have started had I stayed on at IISERM.
Talking about my poetry, even then I don't think I can express the gratitude I have to the friends I've made over the past 5 years and the old friends of mine who have stuck with me through these difficult times. Their camaraderie and friendship is something I value with the highest respect and without which I might haven't been able to achieve what I have done in the past years and I owe to them my personal growth into a better person. Sometimes I like to think about these guys and girls and the happiness they have brought me and I realize that I would have never met most if not all of them had I not chosen to come back from iiser.
Academically I might have become a slacker, I'll have to admit that. But I guess being a 9 pointer slacker ain't that bad I guess! My laziness has the amazing side effect the ability to simplify overly convoluted problems in and out of class. True the old me would have never forgiven me for giving up on hard work, but hey that guy was a racist and a sexist, so who cares ?
A lot has happened around the world in these past 5 years when I changed, the world changed with me, most of which I don't think is for the better, as I became more open minded the world in turn more narrow minded with people full of hate and intolerance gaining power across the world. If there's one thing that I would like to tell everyone based on my experiences is that I took an incident everyone thought was a big negative and would be detrimental to my entire future and tuned it into probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. Yes quitting iiser was perhaps the best thing that ever happened to me, I would never be the person I am today had I not been for that. The liberal, forward thinking, open minded, humanist poet owes his existence to the arrogant boy who quit iiser back in 2013. So if a fool like me can change for the better even after such a 'set back' then why can't able minded people like you change ?
PS : This ain't to say that I don't have any regrets with my life. I do have some, but none of them are associated with dropping out of iiser. But that's a post for some other day.
