Lonely at the Top

So, here comes another one of my seemingly endless self-obsessed, self-praising and self-deprecating posts. But this one is going to be more general, I promise (at least when compared to the ones that came before).

So, here it goes. For so many years now, in school and outside, I've been chasing success like a hungry hyena. I've made sacrifices on the way, like every other person does, and I've not really let emotions ever sway me. In class 9th, I used to study 10-12 hours - utilise every moment of my life to study. And finally, after so many years of chasing, I was at the pinnacle of my success when I topped the Class 12th board exams in Delhi.

But then I looked back, and I realised that i had given up too much. Primary among them that I had given up on a lot of socialising. True, I'm not really your typical social person, but I could have become social - I could have FORCED MYSELF to become social. But I didn't - because what I aimed at that moment did not require me to be social. I kind of ignored my family life. I was so engrossed in the pursuit of academic excellence that I forgot to make my parents feel special. I forgot to tell them how much they matter to me. I forgot to celebrate their little joys and sorrows.

Basically, I forgot how to live life. I'd turned myself into an emotionally unmovable block of stone. And perhaps that is what many of us end up doing. We chase something so blindly, that we forget everything around us. Its like Arjuna and the fish's eye. The fish eye becomes more important to us. And why? Do the goals in life deserve the attention we give them?

Then i came to Stephen's. For the first few weeks, I was, yes, the "Delhi Topper", the quintessential nerd whom everybody respects and loathes at the same time. But then some people made me realise my insufficiencies. They showed me that, in life, to be successful is a different ballgame than to be successful in school.

I've given up a lot to be where I am, yes ... but now that I am in college, I want to do everything that I have not done till now. I want to go around watching movies, I want to wile away my time chatting to people, I want to be myself - dance in my crooked ways, go to college without bathing. Everything I did not do, I want to do now.