Confessions of an IIT Aspirant

[Hidden theme, hope you find it. Will post a 'giveaway theme' later on.
Anyway, enjoy this account, I hope you will.
Dedicated to Nehruji, who started the IITs.]

Driving along from Bombay to Pune to visit my cousin pursuing an MTech from IITB, I remember looking out to the sea, and wondering what lay beyond the horizon. I guess that was the holiday when I had first heard of the words 'horizon' and 'skyline' and was just generally admiring the scenic beauty of the place with the mist over the water on one side, and the skyline of Bombay on the other. It was the summer vacation for my brother and me, and it was at our Aunty Annette's that we lived when we came up to Bombay. We were young back then, about ten years old, but still the 'brand IIT' had been heard of, even if not quite understood. In a land dependent on the agriculture industry, these IITs had made a dominating impact! Our cousin showed us some complicated stuff of magnets and miracles had become natural occurrences.

Back at home and back to school after the summer, we found our thoughts strayed from the lectures in class. Constantly and enthusiastically was I seen trying to explain some electromagnetic thing to my peers. I think that they only ended up thinking that my imagination was without boundary. All this was put to the back of my mind however, till 11th grade, when the ringing of alarm bells at 5:20 a.m. for the 6 o'clock coaching class would interrupt my peaceful slumbering for the next two years. Speaking of bells, it was at this time that I was introduced to Pink Floyd and their album The Division Bell. With IIT aspirations on the one hand, and school friends' fun on the other, the emotional upheavals they caused ensured that my maturation had begun.

"Along the long end of the bimetallic strip is..." started the thermo physics lecturer. "The ball rolls on this flat road and on towards the wall with a friction coefficient of ...", droned the mechanics physics lecturer. Though this should have been hectic and all, I would end up wondering about my friends in my previous school and those in my present one as I walked down the causeway. "Do they still stock up on eggs for Josephs-Germains matches?" Or else, "Maybe I should call some on them in Indiranagar and we could meet there by next week?" All this while simultaneously hoping I'd make the cut for the IIT Bombay Computer Science Department.

Then there was a time when I noticed the competition get fierce. The majority of the coaching-goers were like some ragged band that was worn out and yet still carrying on. As we led, they followed in our footsteps. My ambition was great; for my part, I was running before time, racing against it. We all had our own amibitions, and we all had to stretch, lest complacency took our dreams away.

Leaving the myriad NCERT problems in school for those not into the JEE preparation, we used to pursue those 'higher level' IIT problems during class hours, much to our teachers' displeasure. You can't blame us; those NCERT problems were like small creatures trying their best to lure us into some false sense of achievement. For their part, the teachers wanted to tie us to the NCERT syllabus, so that we acquire good marks for them in the board exams and maintain the school's reputation. Of course, we did make full use of the P.T. periods to play bolleyball in the ground. Without these little bits of fun, we would have been devoting our selves to a life of physics, chemistry and mathematics alone. Consumed by determination and perfection, we had been to excel. And the NCERT problems were left to their slow decay.

On a number of occasions, I would end up looking beyond the moments of temporary satisfaction to the impending glory at the end of those two years' hard work. On other occasions, I would look back at my past and reflect on how much I'd changed recently; seeing embers of bridges I'd crossed and realizing I could not return to being the person I'd earlier been. I doubt I was the only one who was feeling this tempestuous change; I guess we all had bridges of our own, glowing behind us. The hectic pace of our lives had transformed each memory froma clear vision to a glimpse through a fog. Memories of how green our Garden City was, were obscured by the grey concrete present of the Silicon Valley of India. It was on with the rat race for all of us JEE rats, while the others were hanging out with each other. We were all dying to get to the other side of the IIT portal.

I had to face the inevitable debate of whether I would have my steps taken forward out of passion or out of a necessity to work hard. When I was working out of passion, my progress was metaphorically not just walking ahead during the day time, but sleepwalking at night as well. Referring back again to my passion or hard-work debate, even at the height of my being driven by the former, I would doubt whether the latter was enough. I was dragged by the glamour of the computer science subject and Bombay as being the location of my favourite summer vacations. As a force of some considerable magnitude, was y aspiration to enter into the IITB Computer Science branch. This force was like an inner tide dragging me along even when my will and motivation was not very high.

During the coaching class tests, I would picture myself as an eagle soaring off at higher altitude as compared to the other birds. Or when the results of a test were declared, I'd imagine myself as a victorious captain, returning home with flag unfurled. By the end of our first year, a lot of us did indeed feel proud of where we reached in our rat race. The dizzy heights of our seniors' achievements did not look so dizzy now that we had climbed so high ourselves. That dreamed-of world at IIT had become a realistic entity.

Towards the end of the two years, looking back at those times, I thought I had been encumbered forever by various hopes and by love. Personal desire and ambition is not easy to satisfy when you are an IIT aspirant. When you want a top 50 JEE rank, or an IPhO gold medal, theres a hunger to push yourself in various directions, not always parallel. With time before the JEE running out, I found I was still unsatisfied with my preparation., but realized I could not do much about it.

Our weary eyes, having spend an eighth of their lifetime on the IITJEE cause, would relish the slightest out-of-the-ordinary sight; be it a goat with two feet on a wall reaching up to eat a few leaves off a low garden tree, or a bunch of care-free kids doing wheelies for over 100 m. on an empty stretch of road-blocked road. My eyes would still stray to a lost IPhO dream, having not qualified for the selection camp. Those daydreams can still be seen at the horizon, gleaming just out of reach. Though down this path of disappointment I had seen myself go, I would still find myself a new fool's hope to cling on to. This disappointment-following-hope road we've been down at least once; for all of us. For so many times I had witnessed the symptoms of a dying fool's hope, whether it was my X Std. board exams or my IPhO dreams, but my IITB CSE dream would be the last one I'd cling on to, till it inevitably shattered with the final disclosure of the JEE results.