Two Years @ Oxford

Last year after my first year exam results, I posted about how the entire year had been an experiment in 'letting go' of the compelling need to perform well academically. The second year was a continuation, and intensification, of the experiment. I engaged with life, and with academics, in a way that I haven't done earlier - travelled a fair bit, started going to the gym, perfected some of my recipes and tried my hand at others (gobi manchurian!). Three days back, my results came out and I seem to have scored significantly better than last year. At the end of this journey at Oxford, it is therefore quite natural to ask what the last two years mean to me?

What I take out of these two years is a better understanding of who I am. I'll give a short example. When I came to St. Stephen's, some of my friends would refer to me as 'DT', an abbreviation for Delhi Topper. For me, it was easy to let the noise of my academic achievements drown out who I am. I believe that would be the case with many other people. We probably see the symptoms, and confuse that with the underlying cause. For the last several years, I was told that I'm a smart guy. Maybe. Maybe not. I saw a steep ascent in my academic performance starting in the late 2000s, but I don't see why I wouldn't see a decline (steep or gentle) later. But there are other things that have remained fairly constant, and I got a better understanding of those things while at Oxford. For example, I now think equanimity is one of my core features. There is an inherent 'mean-reversion' tendency in my emotions. Whether I am sad or happy, I tend to maintain roughly the same demeanour. I don't characterise this as a strength or weakness, just a feature of who I am.

Through these two years, in a context where my past achievements meant very little to my (far more distinguished) peer group, I got to see how people perceived me. A friend pulled me aside on the last evening at Rhodes House, and said to me that he saw many distinguished people in the room, but what he appreciated most about me was my goodness. That's a sentiment many of my closest friends here seem to have shared. In contrast, at St. Stephen's, arrogance was a word that I often heard, and maybe for good reason (the haughtiness of youth!). Of course, 'good' is a very big word and I'm not sure either I or many of them comprehend all its facets, but there are some aspects of goodness that I have noticed in my behaviour. One, for example, is compassion. I believe that violence (physical, mental, verbal or emotional) can only come out of a fundamental imbalance in power. I now increasingly see people as genuine peers - neither superior nor inferior - and that has meant that I am unable to inflict any form of violence on them. Which now dictates my style (or idea) of leadership, one of a genuine partnership and equality. One where leadership is not a privilege, but a moral obligation. I am looking forward to implementing these ideas in the real world soon, and hopefully they will prove to be robust.

Why all of this is important is that once I have a good understanding of who I am, or what my tendencies are, I can build my life around that. For example, I have been often been able to lead a very disciplined life because of this equanimity. There are days when I am working very hard for no apparent reasons, and some days when I am not working hard despite an approaching exam. My emotions in both cases aren't very different, which therefore allows me to front-load a lot of my work. This last term, I front-loaded much of my exam preparation, starting as early as March, and then kept taking breaks as I approached the examinations (including a trip to breath-takingly beautiful Iceland).

The last two years have pushed and pulled me in various ways. I came to Oxford, sailed smoothly for a while, then had a major crisis, emerged from that, then had a prolonged period of bliss, had another crash and finally ended in a bit of a redemption. These challenges intensified an ongoing process of reflection and, by often reducing me to nothingness, helped me see more clearly. The ebb and flow of life will continue forever, and if I wait to live my life 'fully' tomorrow, that tomorrow will never come. So I chose, instead, to live a little bit of my life everyday, and perhaps one day I will look back at these bits and say that it was a life well lived!