Still Hurt

Here is an e-mail that I wrote to Karan Nagpal, my senior at St. Stephen's, who did not go to the University of Chicago because he fell in love with St. Stephen's. It is now exactly a year since my biggest loss in life thus far.

Hi Karan,

It's now exactly a year since my rejections. One year ago at this time, I was numb with pain, the pain of absolute failure, and more importantly great relative failure. It had seemed as if good luck had closed its doors on me. I did not find any reason to live anymore. That time, in retrospect, was amazing. I spent two months with absolutely no idea of where life was going. I was weightless - I had nothing to do, and I could not plan anything for the future. It taught me great humility, yes, when I had to shed my arrogance of not applying to NTU/NUS in Singapore, to apply to the much-lower-ranked SMU in the same city just to save myself. When I had to swallow my disgust for Mamta Sharma to call her up for admissions to a shady university in Japan.

Then the doors of good luck did open, and how! Topping Delhi was, as Pallo jaan later reiterated (after the loss in the Sumitomo race), a matter of pure chance. In that sense, getting into Yale or Princeton is not much a matter of chance. So, I had been, in that sense, much luckier and probably less deserving than those who got into Yale and Princeton. And to be honest, what hurt me most was that those who did get into these places were the "elite" MUN-er types, whom I had grown a disgust for. I had grown a severe inferiority complex, which was only accentuated by the rejections. And now, as I look back, I feel comfortable in my place and I realise my folly - I should not have made my education so relative. I was somewhere going wrong as far as educating myself was concerned.

And then coming to Stephen's and meeting people like you, Manchit, Aashik, Vedant, Shalaka, Swati and everybody else. Your love is so precious to me that I would not be willing to exchange it for anything now. When people asked me why I didn't apply abroad this year, I would say "I am tired", but honestly, the reason is that I love being in Stephens and am not willing to exchange it for anything. Probably I felt that people might think of it as a looser's excuse and that is why I didn't say it so directly.

My Stephen's experience has not been very productive on the professional front. In that sense, I'm still caught in the time warp of being the "DT", i.e. Delhi Topper. But it has given me so much in the sense of personal joy that this one year will remain the best year of my life. Every other evening, I sit down in my room and have so much affection even for the people whom I'm not supposed to like, because of the simple fact that they are a part of my Stephen's experience.

But yes, today - one year later - that I read about the new set of admissions (Divya Balaji got through Yale, somebody else got through Princeton and somebody got through University of Chicago), there's a regret. Regret that I failed, that I could not make it. And that is why I have this obsession now with going to the US (Mr. Raghunathan grilled me in one of his tutes on this - he said "you cannot NOT know what you want to study abroad). And thus, sometimes I feel that I should make my CV more attuned to foreign admissions.

I try to ask myself - why this obsession? It has moved beyond the "experience" bit that I quoted as my reason for going abroad. It seems like an idea of righting a wrong done to me. I did not feel I deserved to be denied admission. And this is why I still think I should go abroad for education, but now I want to go at a time when nobody can deny me admission.

But then I think about your Dismissal Service speech (which I, of course, missed), and I think about that analogy with the cricketer you gave. And in everything I do nowadays, I think of that - every action I do from now on has to be guided by that feeling. I do not want to be weighed down by the fear and hope of what I do, I want every action I do to be of my own free ill.

Regards,
Subhashish