A Broken Seal
2012
Even as an 8th grader, I rarely possesed that ability to assess my strengths and weaknesses, and come to a decision as to how I could fit into society. Seeing my friends dance, I tried to sway to the rhythm... but eventually decided to leave that piece of cake untouched. I sang all the songs(after hours of listening and learning) which were hot back then, and yet couldn't sound half as melodious as the singers around me. Came into rapping as well, somewhere along the way. I recall all my friends listening to Eminem songs and spitting and cursing some sick rhymes. Half of me did want to be that cool, but the other half just wanted to run. Then began the reading phase when my friends kept walking around with a novel on them and kept reading in between class hours. Like always, I spearheaded into it and began my first venture with a heavy dose of Darren Shan. The Saga was a long one, and gripping would be an understatement. I was addicted to something for the first time, and it felt good. Now I knew it wasn't really a talent, but to honestly want to do something that society appreciated as well(bonus!) was just thrilling. I spent hours reading... so much so that my English teacher called my mom to refrain me from reading English novels in class. The irony! Yet I fought on and kept my books close to my heart (literally and otherwise). But at the back of my mind, there was always a feeling of lagging behind my mates. It was them setting the trend, and me following the current, like a helpless trout. So having ticked off everything from Karate, sports(all of 'em, yes), musical instruments to singing songs that invited vocal chord damage, I decided to call it quits. Maybe I wasn't old enough to figure it out yet... or maybe I wasn't up for it.
2018
Life has this weird way of making you look into the past and wonder how the actual fish you landed where you are now. I found myself doing a course in Engineering in Kerala! A muted transition from that innocent, stout and visibly confused child to a calm and responsible young man was under way during those six years. It saw me evolve into something that was expected of me, yet wasn't really me. I focused more on academics and forced myself to live up to the expectations of those around me. Nobody had ever asked me to pick a particular career in life, and I am grateful for that. So I decided again, that I would travel by a safer path(you all know where this is going, but I will say it anyways). I decided to choose Engineering as my field of higher education. It always felt very unlike me, because I did not ever see myself as a man of innovation. Give me a pack of Lego and I would sit there and wonder why I'm playing with toys, rather than build a city of it! (Call me crazy) Yet I looked around me, at what was expected of me, and the kind of money my mother invested on me. How could I refuse?
I stepped into the College of Engineering Trivandrum hoping for a degree to be labelled as an engineer. What I wanted was just a merry four years of guilt-free happiness and preferably a technical viewpoint toward life. I never approached life quantitatively, it was more of a qualitative approach. Yet I saw that this wasn't expected of us engineers. We needed to see hidden relationships, functions that we must alter to identify properties, which we would capitalise on for our requirements.
In college, I saw both students with a clear goal in life, and I saw people like me... caged birds who fought to keep up. If you are reading this wondering whether I had a tough time doing Engineering, believe me, I've already had enough!(and its just been less than two years). The quantitative side of my understanding has been at overload work for some time now, slowly submerging my qualitative abilities of seeing through non-sense. Now I know I'm studying so that I would be placed at some MNC who is going to pay me big money for my happiness. They will work the hell out of me till I give up and someone will take my place.. and so the cycle continues. How do you break the chain? Why continue when you know the future? This is when the ideas of engineering can be applied to your body. Every product needs a bit of polishing. Think of yourselves as one such specimen. This training of four years will suppress you so hard, it will break your willingness to remain as a shackled animal. In the process, you will sprout colorful wings that will spread over this mirage, pulling you above and over this mere illusion of a meaningless existance.
What do you have to do to be in such a position to view your life from a third perspective? With the gifts of engineering, we can weigh the possibilites of a bright future doing what we do now against the possibility of finding a passion and working more on that. Obviously, many would feel that the former can outweigh the latter, atleast in terms of our income. But that is equivalent to telling ourselves that we must remain in the vast majority to succeed. Ultimately, our definiton of success sets a benchmark for the outcome of our life. Apart from the chance of winning Who Wants to be a Millionaire, we will end up somewhere that we expect in life under most circumstances(if not less). Anything more and we will need to work for it, work so hard it shows in our results, our faces and the tiny beads of perspiration on our foreheads. Now there is a way to bypass all this, if you can call it that. And that way is to do something you love. Find it.. its there somewhere around you, waiting to be found. Embrace it. Love it. And believe me, it's going to change your life!
As you can guess, I love writing. And maybe singing. I could dance too. Who knows. But now I'm going to grind till I see where my mind is at. And I'm going to approach it with the mind of a professional... after all, my bachelor's degree isn't entirely a waste!
Even as an 8th grader, I rarely possesed that ability to assess my strengths and weaknesses, and come to a decision as to how I could fit into society. Seeing my friends dance, I tried to sway to the rhythm... but eventually decided to leave that piece of cake untouched. I sang all the songs(after hours of listening and learning) which were hot back then, and yet couldn't sound half as melodious as the singers around me. Came into rapping as well, somewhere along the way. I recall all my friends listening to Eminem songs and spitting and cursing some sick rhymes. Half of me did want to be that cool, but the other half just wanted to run. Then began the reading phase when my friends kept walking around with a novel on them and kept reading in between class hours. Like always, I spearheaded into it and began my first venture with a heavy dose of Darren Shan. The Saga was a long one, and gripping would be an understatement. I was addicted to something for the first time, and it felt good. Now I knew it wasn't really a talent, but to honestly want to do something that society appreciated as well(bonus!) was just thrilling. I spent hours reading... so much so that my English teacher called my mom to refrain me from reading English novels in class. The irony! Yet I fought on and kept my books close to my heart (literally and otherwise). But at the back of my mind, there was always a feeling of lagging behind my mates. It was them setting the trend, and me following the current, like a helpless trout. So having ticked off everything from Karate, sports(all of 'em, yes), musical instruments to singing songs that invited vocal chord damage, I decided to call it quits. Maybe I wasn't old enough to figure it out yet... or maybe I wasn't up for it.
2018
Life has this weird way of making you look into the past and wonder how the actual fish you landed where you are now. I found myself doing a course in Engineering in Kerala! A muted transition from that innocent, stout and visibly confused child to a calm and responsible young man was under way during those six years. It saw me evolve into something that was expected of me, yet wasn't really me. I focused more on academics and forced myself to live up to the expectations of those around me. Nobody had ever asked me to pick a particular career in life, and I am grateful for that. So I decided again, that I would travel by a safer path(you all know where this is going, but I will say it anyways). I decided to choose Engineering as my field of higher education. It always felt very unlike me, because I did not ever see myself as a man of innovation. Give me a pack of Lego and I would sit there and wonder why I'm playing with toys, rather than build a city of it! (Call me crazy) Yet I looked around me, at what was expected of me, and the kind of money my mother invested on me. How could I refuse?
I stepped into the College of Engineering Trivandrum hoping for a degree to be labelled as an engineer. What I wanted was just a merry four years of guilt-free happiness and preferably a technical viewpoint toward life. I never approached life quantitatively, it was more of a qualitative approach. Yet I saw that this wasn't expected of us engineers. We needed to see hidden relationships, functions that we must alter to identify properties, which we would capitalise on for our requirements.
In college, I saw both students with a clear goal in life, and I saw people like me... caged birds who fought to keep up. If you are reading this wondering whether I had a tough time doing Engineering, believe me, I've already had enough!(and its just been less than two years). The quantitative side of my understanding has been at overload work for some time now, slowly submerging my qualitative abilities of seeing through non-sense. Now I know I'm studying so that I would be placed at some MNC who is going to pay me big money for my happiness. They will work the hell out of me till I give up and someone will take my place.. and so the cycle continues. How do you break the chain? Why continue when you know the future? This is when the ideas of engineering can be applied to your body. Every product needs a bit of polishing. Think of yourselves as one such specimen. This training of four years will suppress you so hard, it will break your willingness to remain as a shackled animal. In the process, you will sprout colorful wings that will spread over this mirage, pulling you above and over this mere illusion of a meaningless existance.
What do you have to do to be in such a position to view your life from a third perspective? With the gifts of engineering, we can weigh the possibilites of a bright future doing what we do now against the possibility of finding a passion and working more on that. Obviously, many would feel that the former can outweigh the latter, atleast in terms of our income. But that is equivalent to telling ourselves that we must remain in the vast majority to succeed. Ultimately, our definiton of success sets a benchmark for the outcome of our life. Apart from the chance of winning Who Wants to be a Millionaire, we will end up somewhere that we expect in life under most circumstances(if not less). Anything more and we will need to work for it, work so hard it shows in our results, our faces and the tiny beads of perspiration on our foreheads. Now there is a way to bypass all this, if you can call it that. And that way is to do something you love. Find it.. its there somewhere around you, waiting to be found. Embrace it. Love it. And believe me, it's going to change your life!
As you can guess, I love writing. And maybe singing. I could dance too. Who knows. But now I'm going to grind till I see where my mind is at. And I'm going to approach it with the mind of a professional... after all, my bachelor's degree isn't entirely a waste!
Comments
Post a Comment