It's been a long time since I've wanted to write this post. I've thought it through to myself several times, yet every time I'm not able to complete the chain of thoughts. I'm hoping now that I'm finally putting it up on my blog, I'm able to express it as vividly as the emotions attached to it.
When I went to sleep on the night of 11th June 2012, it struck me that I had indeed been very fortunate. I remembered that time in Class VII when I looked up at a list of the Top 20 performers of my batch in DPS, R.K.Puram (Deboleena Roy's is the only name from that list that I remember) and I thought to myself that it would be so great to have my name on that list some day. Then that time in Class VIII when I worked so hard to top my section, and finished a 'lowly' fourth. I'd never been the topper types, and never been exceptional in anything that I did. In Class IX, when I began what I can only call the most significant (and last) rivalry of my life with Shubham Prakhar, I did work very hard. But the results were still mediocre, to say the best. I had never been at the top of the food chain, and I never knew how it felt.
On that night, here I was, amazed at how kind God had been. I would have called my topping the Class XII boards as payback for a lifetime of hard work academically, but God had given me more. Something that I could probably cherish for the rest of my life. It means something to me, not because it is a big thing in itself, but because I feel I have deserved it and not just got it by fluke (even though I fully acknowledge the handiwork of luck at play).
The one question that I asked myself (and trust me, nobody else ever did) was which one matters more to me - topping the Class XII boards or topping CAT. Here's the truth: when I topped the Class XII boards, there was very little justification that I could give to myself as to why I topped. After all, I mugged up much of physics and chemistry and had absolutely 0 aptitude for the subjects. In fact, I crammed my way through Maths too, and I justified it saying that I simply out-smarted CBSE. I simply thought to myself that God paid back all the hard work for the NTSE, Olympiads, quizzes etc. There was no functional link here.
However, when I topped the CAT, it felt like vindication. My friends Kashish and Manchit would vouch for the role the word 'quant' played in my life from July to November. As I said, I have never been a fan of mathematics, and hence had to slog long hours to conquer the quantitative section of the CAT. I had worked very hard for it, waking up at 5:30 every morning during the vacations, attending CAT classes from 7 to 9 and then going for my internship from 10 to 5, only to come back and study. Yet, the quantitative section was not why I call the CAT result a vindication (at any rate, I did not do too well on the quant section). Throughout the months and months of CAT preparation, I had not touched the verbal section. Trust me, there is no exaggeration - I had not practiced even 1 verbal section question for the CAT. There was a quiet belief that I was good. And it seemed I was. Scoring 100 percentile on the verbal section was why I did well on the CAT.
Hence, even though the fanfare after my CAT result was a minuscule fraction of the absolute riot that followed the boards result, I feel more attached to the former. My score on verbal was a result of so many things that I never knew would matter. Reading newspapers, for one. Then my failed mission to go through an entire dictionary (I reached C, in any case). And finally, the GRE word lists that I did just for kicks. Almost all my college friends would point out my irritating habit of pointing out flaws in their grammar and vocabulary. It's been a way of life for some time now, and finally it paid off.
What made my CAT result day special was the amazing amount of love that my friends showered on me. Kritika, for one, was there on both days - on phone in 2009 and in person in 2012. The fun part, incidentally, was that my brother informed me that the result was out, but I was busy playing Rise of Nations with Aayush, Niket and Samyobrata. I didn't bother to check. Honestly, I didn't care. Till I saw the actual score. I guess people who know me wouldn't imagine me jumping with joy, but Niket and Samyobrata were witness to that unsavory sight. Manchit was the unfortunate victim to getting woken up at 3 AM in the night. The best part - Mrs. Leema Mohan catching me texting in class, asking me to get up and solve something on the board while she went to change the marker, and then the entire class congratulating me. Life never felt better than to be appreciated by my classmates. Perhaps I'm being extremely materialistic and shallow. So be it.
I guess what makes me happiest is that I could make my family happy. I, like most other people, am full of faults and some of them are particularly severe. However, these two incidents helped me overcome them partially by making my parents and brother proud. For once, I guess I've taken the easier way out.
The one thing that I am fairly certain of, is that it really has been my peer group, and more importantly my friend circle, that has helped me climb the ladder. Had I not met Shubham Prakhar, I wouldn't have got anywhere in life - of that I am certain. Had I not met Kritika, Aeshwarya and Jayati, then the last year of school life would have been an absolutely lifeless drudgery. To imagine even part of my college life without my friends would be sacrilege. More often than not, my friends at college have pampered me like a prodigal friend, and I owe it completely to them.
The reality, and in my opinion the sad reality, of my life has been that I have climbed the ladder in a competitive manner. First there is X, then Y and so on ... it has often been about becoming better than someone progressively. Of course, that came to a near halt in college when the self-limiting tendency of such a process became apparent. This is one part that I do not feel very comfortable with. However, it is thankfully over. I am finally in a space wherein the urge to better myself is not planted by an external stimulus, but is a completely internalised process. Perhaps this is the most significant achievement of my life thus far.
A major learning experience along the way has been criticism. As someone who is himself more critical of others than required, I note that there are three primary reasons for criticism - a genuine need to correct, a need to show off, and a need to hide your own insecurities. More often than not, it is impossible to distinguish between the three. Criticism still gets the better of me. Very often, it seems unjustified and I fight with it in my mind. But the very action of trying to find it means that criticism gets the better of me. Hence, this continues to be my Achilles' heel.
The reality, and in my opinion the sad reality, of my life has been that I have climbed the ladder in a competitive manner. First there is X, then Y and so on ... it has often been about becoming better than someone progressively. Of course, that came to a near halt in college when the self-limiting tendency of such a process became apparent. This is one part that I do not feel very comfortable with. However, it is thankfully over. I am finally in a space wherein the urge to better myself is not planted by an external stimulus, but is a completely internalised process. Perhaps this is the most significant achievement of my life thus far.
A major learning experience along the way has been criticism. As someone who is himself more critical of others than required, I note that there are three primary reasons for criticism - a genuine need to correct, a need to show off, and a need to hide your own insecurities. More often than not, it is impossible to distinguish between the three. Criticism still gets the better of me. Very often, it seems unjustified and I fight with it in my mind. But the very action of trying to find it means that criticism gets the better of me. Hence, this continues to be my Achilles' heel.
At this point of time, a part of me wants to sit down and relax. That part of me says that it's been a long, arduous path. Perhaps it is time to slow down temporarily. But that would tantamount to being untrue to myself. There are also two directions that my thoughts go in. On one hand, I look back at what I aimed to achieve standing before that list of 20 Toppers in Class VII, and I feel I have achieved a lot. On the other, I look around and the humbling reality sets in that no matter how much you achieve, there's always someone who's achieved more. Between the two, I believe, lies human happiness. A perennial disenchantment, along with a sense of fulfillment. At the end of the day, I want to be a good human being; in that I could wake up everyday, look myself in the mirror, and feel proud of having loved and been loved.
