I am in a gloomy room. It is hard to gauge the room's dimensions; physical scales would be useless here. The walls are hard as rock, yet they keep taking up weird forms like slime. The room expands and contracts to fit my body movements. There is no door to escape, not even a window for sunlight to enter. It’s colorful but only in shades of grey. The room looks like a prison, but there are no bars. My body is no longer in its physical form. It’s almost as if the gases that make up grey clouds have replaced the flesh of my body. The walls and my body are performing a rehearsed piece of choreography but my brain was not informed. Anytime I try to get hold of the walls near me, they repel. The living spirit and body are two different entities now, and I am chasing the spirit but can’t get hold of it.
It’s 2012, it’s the same catholic school. The students are on their way back to their classrooms after the morning assembly. The teacher is checking if students have trimmed nails and polished shoes. It’s that girl's turn. The teacher glances at her and says to the other teacher, “What a hard life her parents must be living, it will be tough to marry her off”. A teacher reduced the kid's life worth to being a burden. A teacher. Back home she wanted to tell her parents about the incident, but also feared that the answer was yes. The mirror neurons in her brain are registering all of these.
College was the most fearless period of my life. On the first day of college, I lost interest in academics and the idea of formal education. By the end of the first year, I had given up studying for examinations. I still got through my exams without arrears. I wasn’t one of those gifted geniuses or, the ones who were so much into computers that they did not have to study for the exam. I understood the assignment. Your answer sheet should give the impression that you know things. When you are bored, the thrill of appearing for exams without studying becomes an adventure. Four years passed by like this. In hindsight, I was learning to procrastinate, a habit that I mastered by the end of college and is still my biggest handicap. I was a rebel but against whom I don’t know. No thoughts of dropping out from college ever came because I had no ambitions.
TVF Kota Factory is the talk of the town these days. I am yet to watch it. It is about the trauma the grind to make it to the prestigious IITs give, in the promise of a bright future. I have no intention of hijacking its spotlight but I don’t know why I get a vague sense of uneasiness anytime this is discussed. For someone who was not enrolled in any of such learning centers and was not part of the grind, I should not be bothered by it, I wonder why that's not the case. I was 17 and just "existing" in its most literal sense. I had no hobbies growing up, and as with any such person, I ended up in a tier-3 engineering college. Based on my track record, I would have done poorly in the exam if I had taken it. Self-aware, but the confrontation sucks. It reminds me of the aimless person I was. It is not just about not appearing for an exam but about fear of failure. That fear keeps you from trying a lot of things. You check your screen time on your phone, but now, instead of minutes and hours, the time you wasted is in years. You then start over-compensating, and every marginal failure you encounter seems like a blunder. The brain craves proof that you are not so bad after all, but every small win feels like a fluke, and the real you is an accident waiting to happen.