Aage ka kya socha hai?

Continuing my two week old trend of getting up past 9 in the morning after not hearing when my three alarms ring and then rushing to get ready and reach college, this morning as I walked the 200 odd footsteps to my institute, a sudden realization dawned on me. I took my phone out and updated my facebook status immediately: This is officially my last day to a regular class in undergrad college.

This is an old picture. Taken at Rishikesh. June 2011.

Somehow just realizing this small but significant thing brought a nostalgic smile on my face. The Delhi winters are getting cooler and the sweatshirts and hoodies are out. As I put my hands back into my pockets and braved the chilly morning, I entered the institute. Yes! Those 200 footsteps are a long enough distance for the lazy me!

Two and half years ago everyone in my extended family and close-friends’ circle was worried about where I was going to take admission for my graduation after allegedly ‘dropping out’ of the science stream mid-way through Class 11. I had managed to wade through the deep waters of Physics and Chemistry past the Boards and had proudly answered 3 questions correctly in the IIT-JEE 2010. I had been proud of the fact that I was appearing for the most difficult engineering entrance test on earth. Although I was always interested in the media, somehow I had entered my current course part-accidentally and part-futuristically. And since I have been in here, I have loved each and every moment of it. Each of my semester extends for nearly 5 months and they almost all the time seem to pass very very fast. And here I am, at the last day of the last semester of regular classes.

This last semester has been one of the fastest to fly by. In the past three months, for the first time I did what I had always wanted to do-film editing- thanks to the consistent insistence of a good friend. We established the film society in our college and aired a 20-minute self-created episode based on various genres after shooting, scripting and editing every week. Yesterday a big technical failure due to audio-video-sync problem in our season finale episode had ruined our big plans for a big closure. Today’s attempt failed as well and so ultimately, we decided to upload the episode on YouTube and so, indirectly, we were broadcasting to 7 billion people worldwide instead of the few hundred at my college. Here’s the link, I urge you to take a look and leave your views in the comments section.

The coming days and weeks are going to be more or less the same. The one thing that would change would be that we would be attending regular classes only two days a week with rest of the time dedicated to our final project. This final project- a 12-credit paper (that’s 3 times a normal paper’s credits) - would define a lot of things including answers for a lot many questions. One prominent one being, “What are your plans for next year?”

This question. The most dreaded question for any student. You spend the entire of Class 10 telling people which stream you are going to choose for 11^th and 12^th; by the time you have settled, Which college? is what you need to answer; and by the time you are barely stepping into the final year of graduation, What next: A Masters course or a job? God! Spare us- the innocent students who don’t even know what to do tomorrow- the horror of answering these long-term and seemingly life-changing (or should I say, life-threatening?) questions! I mean, if you come to think about it, this is the easiest question to ask and the difficult-est to answer!

It’s the exam month from tomorrow and soon after these semester exams end, we would be out on our 5-day college trip, details of which I won’t reveal right now. I surely am looking forward to it. The next semester, it seems, shouldn’t be very different considering the kind of work that I have already taken up. All that remains is the answer to the beautifully crafted question, “Aage ka kya socha hai?” I hope by the end of the next 6-months, I would have a strong answer to it.