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Understanding my Privilege: Private School

This summer has been quite nice for me. I've had ample amount of time to do things which has been quite rare for me since I joined law school. I've had time to learn a lot, not just about law or music but about life, experiences and society. I read two books which have slightly influenced me to write about this topic, although the idea had existed in my head for months. The two books being "The Free Voice" by Ravish Kumar and "Born a Crime" by Trevor Noah which talk a lot about the various social disparities in India and South Africa respectively. These two books forced me to introspect and think about how I fit in the socio-political scenario in India. What I'll specifically be dealing with particularly in the series is the idea of Privilege, how I view and understand it and how I believe it has impacted me.

I think the most visible aspect of privilege that comes to mind is that of wealth. Through most of my life I've always considered myself to be middle class largely because I've always lived in a rented house and because my dad could not afford to provide me with things like an iPhone and PlayStation which most kids growing up in an urban household around me seemed to have. For me most of my friends were growing up with these expensive things in their hands and so they were rich and I wasn't poor but I wasn't wealthy either. This notion didn't change until I entered college. There is a huge disparity of wealth even among the middle class in India and no survey of how much wealth the top 10% amass in India can explain that as well as experience does. Perhaps the easiest way to observe this would be to spend a few days walking through the streets of Bombay which is a physical representation of the huge gap in the disparity of wealth in urban India. Studying about poverty as part of college curriculum and how it is viewed in different parts of the world was another eye-opener for me to understand how wealth is largely a relative construct.

Those who possess wealth understand the advantages in life it can afford to you.  Those who don't possess wealth strive to amass it in order to attain those advantages for themselves. Wealth in itself is a privilege but doing a deep dive on it can be a series on its own so I'll just talk about one aspect of it which is private education. It's a privilege most of my peers take for granted not fully comprehending the impact it has on how we fit into society. I've studied in a private school throughout my life. The school fee gradually increased each and every year and in my last year I think I would've paid about 1.25 lakhs as school fee for the entire year. The thought of how high the fee is never occurred to me because I was quite clueless about what my dad earned and there were schools in my city which would cost even more so I considered it to be reasonable. As far as I am aware, there was no one in my class throughout my time in school who was from an economically weaker section of the society and so everyone I knew could afford to pay that much fee every year. It was only when I entered college and I met people from different parts of the country who had studied in all kinds of schools that I realised how varied the affordability of education is in our country. The schools vary from state boards to evergreen CBSE to those pre-independence schools which still survive on the principles of royalty and elitism. The fee too varies from a few thousand rupees to almost 10 lakh per annum and that was my first understanding of the privilege to be able to afford and study in a reputed private school in India.

Most people who study in private schools understand that they had certain facilities and opportunities that others don't. You understand that the infrastructure is much better than one at a State funded school. You have a wide variety of extra-curricular activities you can choose from. Most private schools have at least some basic faculty to teach art and music but as the schools get swankier so do the variety of art-forms the school has to offer. Even with sports, apart from having the standard cricket pitches, basketball and tennis courts you can go to schools which have horses and shooting ranges. These are things that are obvious to you because you can experience these. That's one aspect of economic privilege unlike social privileges likes being a male or belonging to a major religion that its advantages are much more visible. Even though I understood what I was gaining I had no idea about the disadvantages of the EWS.

With any form of privilege there is one common effect it has on a person and that is that it shields you. It blinds you and makes you oblivious to the struggles of those without privilege. Which is the primary reason why those with privilege tend to oppose any form of affirmative action for those who require it since they personally have never felt it's need. They often look at it as them being deprived of their privilege whereas in reality it's just the minority being given some advantage to compete with you while you enjoy your privilege.

Even though there exists legislation to include children belonging to EWS of the society in every school you won't see many in private educational institutes. In the experiences I've come to know of students belonging to EWS studying in private schools, I've come to realise that most of them don’t do well in understanding the academic system of a private institute. They are often studying with the help of modern technology and are expected produce results like someone who hasn't lived their life without WiFi but these kids lack even the most basic technological infrastructure at their home. They are often the subject of bullying by their peers and this can lead to them leaving the privilege of a private school behind. To this comes an argument that it is best that the government creates separate schools for them since they struggle to get comfortable in private schools. Most students in private schools don't oppose other sections of the society getting education they tend to oppose them getting the same standard of education as them. There are certainly faults in the system but integration is necessary for a homogeneous society.

I would have liked to give my 2 cents on affirmative action for the EWS and how their empowerment is necessary for the society but I do not intend for this series to be a political commentary. I don't want you to believe what I say, this is my learning and understanding of my privilege and it may not apply to you at all. The series is just a way to hopefully let people start introspecting about their own privilege. I would have preferred to discuss all the various aspects of the privileges I have grown up with in one post but it’s already longer than I intended it to be so there will be more I shall be posting separately.

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An Account of Distress

This post is an account of something I have been through very recently and written in order to help generate awareness among people about Mental Distress. Due to some reasons I didn't post the same the day it was written and so I took an opportunity on World Mental Health Day to do the same. The post is an account of what someone going through mental distress may feel like and may trigger someone who is battling with Mental Health Issues themselves and thus should be read with caution. I have had prior brushes with Mental Distress in school and my prior experience in no way qualifies me as an expert in the way to handle the same and so I request everyone reading this to not follow my steps in handling the situation and if you're under Mental Distress contact an expert and let them help you out however if you ever just need someone to listen to you, my ears will always be open.

DISCLAIMER - Everything written after this paragraph was written a few days ago when I had a mental breakdown. I haven’t edited or corrected any of it and all of it was written in a flow and in the moment where I felt distressed. I wrote it with the intention of posting it on this blog however I didn’t do it. The post may trigger some of the people who read it and so discretion is advised. 

The Account

I'm under mental distress I've realised and I know I'm not just sad because I've been through both the feelings before and I can figure out the difference. This has been an accumulation of my experiences in the recent past, relating mostly to my college life. I had grown a fear of writing posts like this in college, I guess I trusted the audience in my school more than I did in college but the blog was a getaway from this  and I feel at this point in time it's an appropriate way to deal with it and it's a platform I shouldn't shy away from using.

I guess I have to make it clear that when I write this online I do not want your sympathy and I would like you to stay as far away from addressing the situation as you can if you're doing it because of this post because in the state that I'm in, I know that you won't understand and I want it to be that way. If I have not addressed my situation with you personally there would be a reason for it and I'd like it to remain it this way. I am stable enough to politely ask you to leave mid-conversation if I don't feel okay but please excuse my anger if it comes out on you.  This post is more of a disclaimer and a way to raise awareness and settle my thoughts for a while and not an Invitation for you to ask me to "Calm Down", "Don't take stress", "You shouldn't give a fuck", because in this day and age if that's your response to mental health, you need more help about mental health than I do. If you thought that my behaviour was normal and I don't seem distressed then that's not a clue to me being absolutely fine but a clue that people around you can be going through a lot without you ever realising it. Go through my experience as a learning and not an excuse to dismiss the reality of mental distress.

It feels weird to be back in that headspace again, I'm confused again but there are things I know not to do. I still have that sensibility in me to not take drastic measures to ease the pain and yet I crave something that ease it. I want to take long cold showers or slightly pierce my skin like I used to in school and use it as a substitute for morphine but now I know better to not do it. I know it's triggered due to the enormous stress college has put upon me and I can't wait for the week to get over so I can take a break but I fear that the break will pass by with toxicity. I am an overthinker and although it may seem as if some of the things I say are without any thought, I was probably thinking a lot, it might just be of something completely different. I end up overanalysing small details and although it helps in some situations, when you overanalyse the negatives, you end up in a situation like mine. That seems to be the reason why I'm in this situation, that's what I feel it is. I can't put a label upon what I'm going through as to whether it's a Panic Attack, Depression or something else entirely but it's bad and I need my space to work things out.

It's been a day since I've realised that I'm not okay and that's because a lot has happened. I have an assignment every single day for the next 5 days apart from a Sunday and I need to give every single one of them and the thought of it makes me miserable. I took an hour to write 300 words for an answer yesterday when I already had all the resource material required to write the answer. I would stare at my screen and not know what to do because I would be thinking of something that had no relevance to my work. I cried for a brief moment in my room after watching a BuzzFeed video and that was my moment of realisation that I'm not okay. I wrote a few lines of poetry down to calm me because that's what I used to do in school but I couldn't think of words to express myself in that moment. I thought if I treat myself with good food that'll help but it had no effect on me and so sleep became my last resort at 4 in the night. I woke up several times in my 6 hours of sleep and although I don't remember what I was dreaming about I was in panic and the moment I woke up I thought of what I was going through before I slept and it hit me all over again. It was as if the waves had retreated only to wash over me again when I opened my eyes again.

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Precedents of Life

I’ve completed 2 years in college and my thought process has undergone a significant change in that process. My interaction with law on a daily basis has influenced the way I perceive things around me and analyse them. It was during a walk at night when I was trying to explain my sense of morals to a friend from college when I ended up giving an analogy of my morals with precedents in law and that’s where I have come up with the idea of this blog post. When it comes to following moral principles, there are some I’ve learnt which I follow as strictly as possible, which do not change with time or social circumstances. They’re more of principles I wish to live my life by and just like precedents in law, I feel as if they are binding upon me, which I shouldn’t digress from. Following a life based on principles probably will make me a very static human but these principles include some lessons of life I don’t think I’d like to forget or move away from. Shah Rukh Khan says that one shouldn’t become a philosopher until one is rich first and although I haven’t become rich yet I’m just going to share some of the principles I follow over here on this blog. They may or may not appeal to you but they seem to have worked fairly well in my case. 

Principle 1 - People always Leave

I was in 10th grade when these words were first spoken to me by a friend. I was in a very dark head space at that time. I was surrounded by people and yet I felt as if I had no one to talk to. I felt alone among people I had known for years. It was during these times that I found someone who made me realize that regardless of how long you’ve known someone or how close you were to them, people leave you and you need to move on. It was not easy to accept these words at that very moment. It took me months to fully digest the fact that this is a reality that I live in. No matter what adjective you use to label the intensity of your relationship with a person, the dynamics of it will change and there will be times when that label ceases to have any meaning attached to it. People will lose their relevance in your life that they might’ve shared at one point of time and when they lose relevance they are likely to leave you. This does not mean you lose respect for someone when they do leave or that they will never come back. It’s just something I tell myself to ensure I don’t go back to that feeling of loneliness.

Principle 2 - Don’t Break Promises to Yourself

I think promises make an integral part of social relations because they are a way of expressing trust to a person and following those promises are indicative of how much you value said person. Humans attach a lot of value to promises made to them and if these promises are broken they can at times break people. I arrive at such a conclusion because I personally feel a lot of people in my life have broken promises they made to me and that affected me negatively. I guess a reason for this is that people have a habit of making empty promises and not really caring much about the consequences of what they speak.

I’m not sure how many people follow this practice but I make quite a few promises to myself. Promises to do or not do something or behave in a certain manner. I feel if I start breaking promises I make to myself I’ll start breaking promises I make to others as well. I guess the concept behind it is that if I cease to have value for myself I’ll cease to value those around me as well. This principle is complementary to the fact that I try my best to not make empty promises or promises I know I cannot or will not be able to keep. I really feel that if I do this, maybe those around me will ensure that they don’t break promises they make to me. 

Principle 3 - Never trust anyone absolutely 

This probably seems quite negative but I live by this. I don’t think its right for me to tell anyone to do this, it probably isn’t a very healthy perspective with which one should live their life and if someone feels that they shouldn’t follow it, they shouldn’t. This is largely derived from the same life experiences as the first principle. I think it’s too big a risk too trust someone absolutely. I don’t have anyone I go and share the details of my life with, rather I like keeping certain aspects of my life always hidden from people. There would always be crucial details of my life some people around me would not be aware about and some details no one would be aware of. This does not mean I do not have people I trust or confide in, I do but even those people have certain sides of my life hidden from them. Although this principle evolved as a reason of having had my trust broken by several people, it seems to have merged into my personality quite well. it adds a certain mystery to me which I really like and  I like staying in this gray area over which I have some control, I think it makes introspection quite interesting for me because even I can’t arrive at black & white conclusions to my actions. 

I am still quite unsure whether further studies in law would break down this analogy of precedents in life for me. I am not sure that if this analogy stands the test of time whether I will continue to follow the principle of stare decisis in an absolute sense or whether the like the Courts in this country I will occasionally derogate from it. I am quite unsure whether these principles will be overturned by newer ones in the future and I am quite unsure how I should conclude this blog post. I guess I’ll leave this in the gray as well.

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Of Silence and Speech

It’s been 4 years since this blog started and gradually the gaps among each of my posts has increased. It’s not as if there is less to write about or I had some kind of writer’s block, I’ve just been too involved writing other things that aren’t private in nature, things which I realized have brought a change in the way I write. There has also been an incident which changed the way I express myself by words I speak. I’ve been wanting to write about that incident for a long time and today it’s been exactly one year since that day. I can’t think of a better date to write on it except today.

I’ve never been a very talkative kid, largely due to being a shy kid for most of my school life and not having the guts to express myself in front of another. I wouldn’t even answer questions in class because of it. I still am a fairly quiet person, I don’t like to participate in unnecessary blabber that goes around me. I still like to listen to conversations and opinions to form my own instead of imposing mine on another. 

It took me a long time to overcome my fear of speaking out. It came gradually as I slowly started participating in public speaking activities in school. I slowly gained confidence to answer in class. Slowly and eventually it has come to point where I don’t think I will have a problem even if I have to address a 1000 people. As I gained confidence to speak to large audiences I also learnt a little about talking to strangers. 

The biggest hurdle however was to gain the confidence to speak what I was thinking. I did not have the confidence to be able to speak what I really thought. I used to be very scared to express what I really wanted to my parents because I was scared they differed from my opinions and because my mom has been an intimidating figure throughout school. Once I overcame that fear I don’t think I’ve really thought much about another person’s opinion about what I think. I had the freedom to speak what I wanted and I utilized it. I have become a fairly blunt (which comes off as rude at times) person because of it but I like it this way. This changed however last year when the incident occurred.

I will not get into the details of the incident, it’s an event of the past I do not wish to hold people accountable for it. The basic gist of the event however is that I liked a certain meme on a certain political personality on their birth anniversary as a result of which I received a threat call at 3:30 AM in the night. I listened to him patiently for an hour until he calmed down and ended the threats with “this is not a threat”. The last part wasn’t really consoling in any form whatsoever. I knew a large part of his threats weren’t going to be actualized but they shook me. I wasn’t scared enough to be unable to perform my daily functions but I became more conscious every time I had to express a political opinion online.

I was someone who believed in absolute freedom of speech and expression, which although does not exist in the country, I believe it should’ve (My view on this has changed after joining law school, not because of the incident). The incident confused me for a long time because it made me think twice about what I was expressing. As much as I wish to be able to express myself freely it seems this country and its sentiments prevent me from doing so. I had started to contemplate who I could be offending with a statement or a like or a share on social media. My parents ask me to not speak anything stupid because they feel someone might come and break my bones (a practice which has become common in this country). The only conclusion I’ve wanted to come out of this entire incident was to be able to feel free enough to express myself again and although I still remain a fairly blunt and confident human, I do not feel free anymore.

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Rewind - Linkin Park

I have been trying to figure out for a long time how to end to this series of posts and I couldn’t seem to think of finding anything better than talk about one thing that has remained constant throughout. It also serves as a small token of appreciation for everything Chester’s voice has done for me. 

I still remember I was about 5 or 6 year old when my brother and his friend were sitting in front of TV trying to make random guesses about which music video will be playing next and they wished that it would be really nice if “In the end” would play next. Their wish did become true and I remember seeing the excitement on their faces which was probably a mix of getting a guess right and of listening to a track they liked. I wasn’t paying much attention to the songs but to this one I did simply because their excitement excited me. I still remember watching the video open with orange skies and Chester singing atop a tower in the middle of nowhere. I remember falling in love with the song and the band at that moment. I remember this used to be the only song in English I listened to for a long time and I would just play it on loop. 

I am not a very social person but I’ve talked about the band to other people for long periods of time without ever feeling weird, regardless of how well I knew them or not, their love and appreciation for the band was good enough for me to make me interact with them. I remember in 3rd grade I was mumbling a Linkin Park song all to myself and another guy was mumbling the same song and that’s how I made my best friend in 3rd grade, someone I would sing Linkin Park songs with and dream about making our own cover band with. I was always jealous of my friends who went and bought CD’s of all their albums released till that point of time while I didn’t because I felt like I was their biggest fan. The social interaction because of the band doesn’t seem to end even years after I first heard them. 

The blog in itself has a long connection with the band with my 5th post on the blog being about “Don’t Stay” and what the band means to me. 3 years and 9 months after post the band only means more to me. Regardless of what made me feel low and regardless of how much the lyrics correlated to the problem, listening to them would always calm me down and just like Chester screamed for millions of depressed voices, he screamed for me when I couldn’t.

I still remember I was reading HT City on my birthday when I read the “you share your birthday with” section, only to see Chester’s photo with a few lines about him. I haven’t wished him in person and I won’t get the chance to, but I would wish him every year on his birthday by saying it to myself. I remember putting up a post on my Instagram last year to wish him a happy birthday. My 16th birthday was a lonely one, one which probably no one would call enjoyable but listening to his songs that day made it so much better. 

I remember reading comments on the YouTube videos of their songs reading all about how they’ve changed and weren’t the same as before but I can only appreciate them for diversifying my taste in music, where I can listen to any genre and still find a Linkin Park song in it.They were my introduction to Rock and they were my introduction to Hip-Hop and can’t seem to recall any other group that was so good at both the things at the same time. 

Here I sit in a dark room looking at the music video for “One more Light” which released a few hours ago only reminded of how powerful his screams were, yet it could switch the next moment to the most soothing voice I ever heard.  Rest in Peace Chester

“Who cares if one more light goes out? In a sky of a million stars It flickers, flickers Who cares when someone's time runs out? If a moment is all we are We're quicker, quicker Who cares if one more light goes out? Well I do”

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Rewind - Awake

Let me just rewind to a night about 14 years ago. I’m positioned between my brother and my mother on the bed, both of whom are asleep. I remember there used to be a small coloured bulb in our room because I was afraid of the darkness. It was the first time I remember not sleeping at night and it probably was the first time ever as well because I remember exclaiming to my mother in the morning how I didn’t sleep the entire night. Somehow not sleeping seemed to be a very important moment in the life of a kindergarten-er like me. It was also the dullest night of my life till that moment, simply because I didn’t do anything staying awake. I just sat on my bed for about 8 hours, thinking and wondering about things a 5 year old thinks about. I was hungry, I was tired, I was bored but I wasn’t sleepy and I couldn’t do much to help myself with any of these problems. 

I wasn’t aware at that time how staying awake at night isn’t really an exciting thing in life. I didn’t have a clue about how that event could connect to my habits of the future. The past 6 years of my life have been filled with nights such as that one in 2003. A lot of the posts on this blog have been written on some of those sleepless night, and every single post has been written past 12 in the night. 

A lot of those nights were a result of examinations and deadlines. These were the ones that I forced upon myself. These nights have been some of the unhealthiest decisions I have taken in my life. I recall times where I would sleep about 30 hours a week just so I could focus upon my studies during exams. Staying up for 2-3 days straight, with about 3 hours of sleep at max and that is the last thing I wish to do again because neither does it benefit during the exams nor your health. I remember having hallucinations from the lack of sleep and that’s one of the worst things I have done to my body.

Another significant amount of those sleepless nights were just before this blog started and were much more regular and frequent. I can’t say much about how they affected my health because they were the consequence of me not being well mentally. These nights weren’t dull or boring or forced like the other times, they were more of a fight with myself for sleep. Dark nights filled with thoughts of loneliness, depression, self-harm and suicide accompanied with pillows wet with tears full of despair.

Fast forward to 14 years later from that night to this day. It’s 2:30 in the night as I write this post and I’m sitting on my bed, in a different house in a different city. I am in no more need of a dim bulb to help me sleep at night. I don’t have a count of the sleepless nights in my life anymore. It’s no more a moment to exclaim or be excited about, it has become a routine of sorts, I am no longer tired or bored or sleepy but I am still hungry and still foolish.

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Rewind - Memories or Dreams?

What all do you remember from your childhood? That is a question that came to my mind after writing the previous post, and in order to answer it my mind started making attempts to figure out as to what I remember about myself from 10 years ago?

My first sensory experience I recall isn’t a visual one, it’s one of taste & smell, the taste & smell of Baby Food to be precise. I don’t have any other information about it apart from this. I don’t remember how old I was when I first ate it, till what age I ate it, which brand I had, how much of it I had in a day, I don’t recall any of these. I just remember having it & I remember that I used to like it. Even today every time that I see it somewhere, it feels like a deja vu moment. This is the very first sensory experience I recall.

I recall quite a lot from the first visual memory of myself. I was probably 3 or 4, back then, it was quite early in the day and I remember asking my mother how my name was spelled. I faintly remember that instead of A, I thought my name started from a ‘U’ or an ‘O’ going by the way it was pronounced. I find it amusing how my first memory relates to the one thing which humans use to identify and distinguish each other from, their name. That was the day I learnt to spell my first name.  More than this incident I find it really surprising how much I remember from that situation, it’s been about 15 years since we left that house, yet I remember some things from that house because of this incident. I remember that I was sitting on the right side of the sofa, my dad was sitting in front of me, and he was drinking tea/milk, when I asked the question. I remember my mother when she answered, was standing behind me. These are the details I remember of that incident, I remember some other details about the furniture, but that was probably because that furniture stayed the same for a long time even though we shifted houses. 

There are some other details that come to my mind, but they are too well defined for me to remember after 15 years so I’m assuming that it’s just my mind trying to fill in gaps in my memory and that somewhat scares me because it makes me doubt myself, as to what all I remember is actually true and what all is made up. It is this doubt about my memories, that makes me add that question mark at the end of the title of this post. 

I remember another thing in good detail which my parents have informed me never happened, and I believe them, because looking at it logically it seems highly unlikely it happened, yet I seem to remember those visuals very well and it seems too real to be a dream. The whole incident revolves around me going to a school in Delhi, near my Grandparents house. I know it’s fake because I never went to a school in Delhi. I was probably 4 around that time, but I remember very clearly sitting in a Van that came in the afternoon filled with schoolchildren, the next thing I remember is being in the school filled with children about my age, and I remember the teacher calling me and she showed me something on the computer, which I don’t recall, but every time I think of this situation, I imagine a purple computer, a detail I think is too specific for a fake memory. 

I planned on starting this post series as a way to understand myself better, find some answers about myself, but writing this post only seems to generate more questions about myself, and the only thing I can take away is that life is a continuous process of overwriting your own memories and one day I’ll forget myself in that process.

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Rewind - The Kid

I’m 19 years old, I’m going to finish my teen years next march. If someone were to ask me a about my age, it’ll take me a bit of time to realise that I’m 19 not 18, because there has barely been a a change in the surroundings. There barely is a change in the surroundings after any succeeding year, but when you turn 18 there are some highlight event of your life that take place, most 18 year olds finish their last year of school and join an institute of higher learning, you’re eligible to vote and drive, and do some other stuff. You’re finally considered an adult. No such change happens at 19. Even if I think, than mentally I still feel like a 16 year old, I’m smarter than my 16 year old self but I feel 16 nonetheless. It seems so weird that I am supposed to be an adult, and in an year when I’m done with my teens I’m supposed to be ‘adulter’ than I am. I’ve talked mainly about my pubescent years in the last 3 years of my blog, but right now I’d like to rewind and go to a relatively happier phase in my life and talk about my first memories, memories I developed when I didn’t properly understand the word memories. I’ve wanted to do this for a while now, talk about myself as a kid, because that innocent looking yet mischievous kid got lost somewhere in my puberty. I still wish that I retained a significant amount of that kiddish nature (bachpana) in me. I know a significant chunk of the society frowns upon them because they don’t act their age, and certain times they should do that, but most people who act their age end up forgetting that kid they were I think, and I don’t think anyone should do that just to become mature. I somewhat like people who’re a bit kiddish, the world thinks that they won’t survive the world, or the rat race, but the question of surviving the rat race should only come to the mind of people who’re part of it, and kids are not, and I personally don’t feel that you need to be a part of the rat race, i think you can do quite a lot not being part of the marathon of life. Being a kid makes you free in a very different sense than you are as an adult basing your ideas of freedom in a very socio-political context. The freedom of speech and expression wasn’t about whether or not you can question the state freely, it was more about asking the same stupid question repeatedly. Your vocabulary is limited but your dreams are not. You weren’t asked why you want to become a pilot or doctor or an astronaut or even Superman (even though you’re scared of spiders and the dark), you were told you could be what you dreamed, and as a practical man, I’d think this is just giving a kid false hopes, but then again not letting a kid dream kills half his childhood. This is just an introduction to a small series of posts I plan on writing about some of my memories as a kid, try to reflect upon them because the way I’ll view them now will be much different than I did when I was that age, maybe some of them have changed me in a way I didn’t realise, maybe they’re similar to some other recent events in my life, maybe they’re completely different, maybe I’ll learn something from my 7 year old self, I just think it’s a good idea to look at myself from back then from a different lens.

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Accepting Change

This post wasn't meant to be written in succession to my previous blog post, but I guess it fits well with it and I'd recommend people to go through the previous one first. I've completed an year in college, an year in another city, with new people all around me, and it's a different environment in every manner, I am no more the only person in the group with an interest in Law, but I am now the only person in the group with great interest in music. I've realised that in this new city in the past year, it's not just my surroundings that have changed, I have as well. I had been really confused about this change when I was going through it, I felt trapped between my previous self and the newer version of myself, I started to feel as if this new person wasn't me, but I've realised that the way I have become was due to factors not under my control. College is a new place, and you meet new people and make new friends and even though I have made a good few here, and seemed to have improved my social skills in this place filled with extroverts, I've realised that my connection with these people isn't the same as my connection with the people back home. Over here, I'm surrounded by the same people throughout the day, I spend more time talking to them everyday than I used to spend at home talking to my parents. I'm surrounded by these people at my hostel, in my room everyday, whereas at home, I used to see them for 6 hours a day in the school and a few hours a week after that, yet I'm much more familiar with them, maybe because I've seen them become the adults that they are now and with people here, it's a new start, they've lived that part of their lives that moulds the basic structure of their personality. This blog is another reason why it's different, I've been writing about myself here for 3 years and people who've known me for that long know things about me that I haven't talked about with them, but they know because of this blog, and that does bring somewhat of an understanding about me as a person, here people don't know my past, and when I started college I did treat college as a new clean slate, and that really changed the person who I am. The people here understand me in a very different context than the people back at home. People here don't seem much interested in knowing someone's past, it is too much about the everyday situation and the future, and I'm someone who believes that a person's past is their most defining characteristic, and that somewhat makes me feel like my relationships with people here are very shallow, or it may just be that I take too much time to be close to someone. My relationships with people isn't the only change, but it was the one which was so drastic, that I started to question who I am and what I've become. I've realised that I have changed, and I've come to accept that, but more than that, I've realised that this change is just a measure to adapt to the change in environment, now that I've spent 2 weeks at home, I've realised that my previous self is still a part of me and I'm not trapped between 2 personalities, just trapped between 2 places, one of which I am still adapting to, and I've realised that it won't be the last time I'll undergo a drastic change, and I guess I've finally accepted that change is inevitable.

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2 Years - 2 Identities

Last year, this time I was almost done with my 12th grade board examinations. January and February seemed to pass so slowly, and more than my birthday in the month of March, I awaited the end of my school life, it seemed like 12th grade had gone on for too long. My day used to start at 8 in the morning with school, with my tuition ending at 8 and my self studying done by 12 (on the days that I did try to self study) and I could continue with my own thoughts post that. This year I have over a month till my exams come and January and February seemed to have passed so quickly because of the college fest. My day is supposed to start at 8:30 but I tend to start it later by choosing sleep over the first lecture, and I don’t remember the last time I came back home from college before 6:30 in the evening, too tired and sleepy to even think of doing anything and I try to sleep by 12, and when I try to sleep I just wish I could pass out, so I could skip the random thoughts that occur in my mind while I’m slowly falling asleep.

I remember not attending parties of my friends because at times there would be too many people there I did not know or talk to and now here I am in a place surrounded with strangers, going to parties much different in their nature than the parties I used to go to, which are filled with those strangers from college.

There was a constant thought in my mind when it came to loneliness, where at times I felt alone and hated it, while at other times I just enjoyed my own company in my own room. Here I’m surrounded by so many people it’s hard to be completely alone, where I can enjoy my own company, where I can find the time and peace to introspect, a place I can be without being disturbed.

It was a time where my life was filled with thoughts and questions of depression, suicide, mental illness and here no one seems to know about that aspect of my life, there’s just a vacuum in place of it, and as negative as these emotions were, they were constant reminders about the existence of something better and now these reminders seem to have no effect whatsoever on my life.

It isn’t the different people and the food that seem to distinguish my last 2 years as much as I as a person seem to. I’m an introvert surrounded by extroverts, and the environment seems to be too loud for my taste. There is a constant friction in my mind between who I was and who I am and even though I don’t wish to relive my past life and I understand the reasons for this change, this friction seems impossible to stop because of the vast amounts of differences that exist among the 2 personalities, that I do/used to possess.

I’ve become unrecognizable to myself

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Isolated System

“ In an isolated system, entropy can only increase ”

It’s something which I was taught for the first time in Thermodynamics in Chemistry in 11th Grade but the real reason I still remember it after 2 years and after leaving Science is because of the Muse song titled Isolated System which has only that line repeated throughout the whole song. Even though this principle applies very well in the field of Science I believe when it comes to social situations, isolation leads to a decrease in entropy. 

There have been so many things and people who motivate me and inspire me to work towards improving myself and usually every time this happens I try to frame a basic plan in my mind of things to do & not to do to achieve a specific aim yet somehow that plan doesn’t seem to get implemented and I’ve pondered a lot about why it tends to happen and one reason which I’ve come to realize is the cause of this is that there are too many dynamic factors in life which I cannot seem to calculate when I chalk out plans for myself and the best way possible that I can think of to reduce these dynamic factors is to reduce the causes of such factors and that I believe can only happen through isolation.

Absolute isolation even though is possible, isn’t something I aim to achieve, and it isn’t something which should be sought as man truly is a social animal, something I’ve realized after my past trifles with isolation. However an Isolated System for me seems to be a more ideal way of working in comparison to working in an environment where there are several factors to influence & distract you. This may be because of the fact that I’m not a very social person myself and have always leaned towards introversion on the Introversion Extroversion Scale. The silence of a dark room somehow always has a more stimulating effect on my mind than a social gathering with groovy music. 

It is tough to find a time & place to create this isolated system in college where you have over 300 students in your batch, 50 in your hostel and have to share your room with another person. You’re constantly surrounded with people, people who unlike you, are great at socializing and in order to not isolate myself absolutely I tend to socialize as well however, this whole experience of interaction, being surrounded by people is a concept which is very much new to me, and it is tough for me to observe & analyse my surroundings and introspect my life like I used to and currently I do find a growing need to create an isolated system around me in order to be able to live my life like I did at my own house. 

Somehow as much as I disagree with the application of the 2nd law of thermodynamics in real life situations, I can’t deny that in order for there to be equilibrium (in life), the entropy either has to increase or remain constant, and cannot decrease as I hope for it to be.  

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Opening up

It’s a new year and it’s been exactly 3 years since I started this blog. A lot has changed over the years and I’ve come to realise that after I recently went through my blog, and what I started it off as and what it has become is very different however it still remains an integral part of  me. Going over these posts helped me track my life through the past 3 years and see the change and one significant change is in the way I interact with people.

A lot of people who’ve known me for a long time know that I am introverted, however a good number of people who have had very little interaction with me at times do find it hard to believe that I am one. I think the major reason for that is because people associate introversion with being timid, which is a trait many introverts do possess and so did I and even though I’ve overcome it to an extent, it is a personality trait which has been with me for over 16 years, after which I started to overcome it to a certain level. 

Some people are timid only around new people and not around people they’re close to such as family. I on the other hand was very awkward and shy even with my family, and even though over time I’ve come to be much more comfortable with my parents and brother, that awkwardness comes around again whenever I meet distant relatives and it might take me a few days with them for me to become comfortable with them. 

One of the first instances that come to my mind when I opened up to my family is that moment when me and my dad were walking from the car parking towards our home and we were having a conversation about my future career. I was in 10th grade I think and I gathered the courage to speak out and say I wanted to get into music production. It may seem like a pretty small incident because I’m not able to put into words what all went through my mind in the minutes before I spoke that out. It took a lot of guts for me to be able to do that.

To put things into a better perspective in 10th grade I still had a minute amount of fear whenever I gave my order for food over the phone, and even now I have to mentally prepare myself before I call out the waiter at a restaurant. All of this may seem unbelievable since I am very confident when I speak about matters of international politics at a Model UN Conference, but even there it took me a lot of time before my legs stopped shivering before my first speech of the conference. In fact it only stopped shivering once I started researching so thoroughly that I was confident enough that there isn’t anything I didn’t have the answer to. 

I’ve made a significant number of friends after coming to college and I guess the number wouldn’t have been even half of what it is right now had I not known someone from before who was much more social than I was and who introduced me to all the new friends he made at college.

I’m not a good conversation starter either and neither have I tried becoming one and I have never been fond of phone calls or video chats, but over my time at college being away from people, I have learnt to be okay with them and don’t generally avoid them. I find it much easier to chat with people and I find it much easier to start conversations on chat and most of the time, it’ll generally be me commenting about a new picture/status they posted on social media. I find it much easier to respond and branch off and that’s much easier on chat since I get time to think. Conversations generally include questions and statements and I find it much easier to respond to questions since there’s a fixed answer which you will give, as for statements I can take my time on chat and analyse it to branch it off. So a statement about an XYZ event in ABC college gives my a choice to talk about XYZ or ABC and I’ll choose the one I’m more comfortable with. This seems like a very programmed way of having a conversation but when you try to teach yourself how to converse it would be programmed to an extent. 

I still possess that little bit of timidness with me but I’ve learnt to mentally prepare myself to give that up easily. It’s like the mental barrier which keeps my mind closed up is still there, but I manage make a hole in it and depending on the other person, that hole either closes down or opens up so much that the barrier falls down. 

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Why I Took Science

I’ve been asked this question too many times and I’ve always given some sort of one line answer but I don’t think that any one line answer could properly elaborate as to why I did take Science (Physics, Chemistry & Maths) in 11th and 12th Grade. 

I guess the first time this question started to make me properly think about my decision was in 12th Grade, a time when it was too late to change my choice and I suppose it can only be explained well if I trace it back to the time I was actually given the choice to choose my subject, which was in 10th Grade. 

I didn’t want to do engineering, I was a 100% sure that I didn’t want to. I took computer science because it appealed to me the more than biology, economics, physical education or fine arts & I’m glad because it was the one & only subject apart from English for which I wasn’t worried a single bit. I didn’t want to do the work or style of work that my brother & dad were doing, and I was sure that it’s too much of a struggle to make money from it unless I get into a college like IIT, an institute I knew I wasn’t going to work hard for which is why I never joined any coaching for cracking IIT because I knew I was never going to give it. I remember when the entrance forms for colleges came out and my classmates asked me what all entrances I plan on giving and all I said was CLAT. They were just too confused as to why I would study Science for 2 years if I didn’t want to do engineering and I suppose I am the only person from my class who did not give the IIT Mains exam (or any other science related entrance exam). It was a genuine question though, practically speaking it made no sense whatsoever to take science if you were a 100% sure you didn’t want a career in science. The little passion I had for pursuing physics faded when it was more about calculations than theories. Science, especially physics still interests me, but the way CBSE teaches and evaluates it made me want to get away from it as soon as possible, something I couldn’t think would happen when I was selecting my subjects in 10th grade.

Science wasn’t my initial choice, I wanted Humanities and that is what I said when my mother asked me what subjects I’m going to write down in the form the school had given me. I didn’t want to do law back then, in fact Law wouldn’t have been there in my top 10 career options back then. I wanted to do something in the field of Music, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it but it was the one thing which had remained constant in my life and the one thing which I absolutely loved. I even asked my School Principal as to what stream I should take if I wanted to get into music and she too said you should take Humanities. I still remember that scene very well (mostly because it took a lot of courage for me to stand up and talk about me pursuing a career in music in front of over at least 200 people, and I was a very shy kid in 10th grade), I was sitting at the end of the AV Room with the rest of 10th Grade and the Principal was standing with a mic in her hand, answering doubts the children had regarding choosing their streams.

When I was in 9th & 10th grade, the one thing my mother always used to say to me in order to maybe motivate me to score better was that the school won’t allow me to choose science as a stream if I don’t get a good overall score. Now I know that in a lot of schools certain streams are generally denied to children who fail to score above a certain overall score, and the score required for science is the highest & that of Humanities tends to be lowest (probably why a large section of our society looks down upon Humanities), but I know that wasn’t the case in my school because I knew people who had very poor scores who were sitting in 11th grade with science as their subject. Nevertheless those words failed to motivate me to study harder, I didn’t care much about grades, I got a 9.0 in CCE (after an up-gradation in 2 subjects) which I consider to be very low seeing how easy it is to score in CCE, but I was satisfied.

Now what the whole thing boils down to is that throughout 9th & 10th grade, I wasn’t extremely bright when it came to social studies whereas I was really good in science. Now I wanted to take Humanities because I wanted to do music, but I would have to study subjects like History & Political Science for it, something which I absolutely did not mind since I had no problems with those subjects, I really liked them & I still do. The problem was my score in science was just better than it was in social science, so my mother told me that you should take science because you won’t be able to do Humanities, which I found really weird coming from the mouth of someone who had for the past 2 years been telling me I wasn’t good/smart enough for science. I had suddenly become eligible for science and ineligible for humanities. Somehow my mother was successful in establishing that notion in my mind that science gives you more opportunities (something which is completely false now that I have studied both science & humanities) and that at the end of the day it is your 12th board marks which matter the most (they do matter but not as much as people say they do) & I will score more if I take science. So my primary reason to take science was to maybe score more in my board exams than I would had I taken humanities.

I don’t keep regrets, I know it is a temporary feeling which passes after some time & taking science isn’t something I regret. It was a very depressing journey but I would’ve turned out to be a very different one had I taken Humanities and even though I wasn’t very happy studying science, I’m very happy being the person I am today and me taking science & studying hard for it has transformed my personality in a major way.

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Geography & Stereotypes

I’ve grown up mainly in the Delhi/NCR Region and belong to a Punjabi family and most people I came to know before college were somewhat similar to me. A large population of Delhi can understand, if not speak Punjabi and I’ve come to know South Indians who’ve grown up in Delhi who understood Punjabi & Hindi so well that it would be very difficult to recognize them as South Indians going by the way they talk.

College on the other hand is much more diverse than I imagined and over here I’ve come to know people belonging to different regions of the country and it has changed my understanding of people and the different places in India to a large extent.  Earlier if someone were to ask me to describe a state or a place the first thing that would come to my mind would be the language & the food of the place and I’ve come to realize there’s more to a region than just the language and the food and I feel very ignorant about not having realized something like this earlier since it seems so obvious now that I think about it.

Another thing that came to my notice is the large number of stereotypes we make about a person simply based on the region/culture he belongs to and my History teacher at college helped a lot in me understanding this by talking about the different regions of India and their cultures.

When I inform people that I am a Punjabi from Delhi the very first thing people are to assume is the fact that I abuse a lot and I can’t deny the fact that abuses are thrown around in even the lightest of conversations and it is a practice I may have picked up to an extent. However I can’t seem to understand why it is only Delhi which is tagged as abusive when I’ve come to see at college that almost anyone from anywhere in India abuses as much as a Delhiite, the abuses may not be as varied or as insulting as the ones used in Delhi, but the frequency more or less remains the same.

I’ve also come to understand that there exists a stereotype that North Indians don’t understand English really well which I have absolutely failed to understand, maybe because I don’t believe that this stereotype applies to me. Maybe it exists because CBSE just has a very poor syllabus and method of teaching English as a subject.

I understand that the reason stereotypes exist is because it applies to a large majority however I’ve never really been into classifying things/people in a very general manner (A reason why I’ve never understood how sociology has come to be a proper subject) mostly because I don’t feel like they apply to me in a lot of cases. I’m a Punjabi who clearly doesn’t look like it (I look like someone from Nepal or the North East if I am to go by the opinions of a large number of people) nor do I act like one. I don’t like to drink or smoke, nor do I stay high on drugs (an image which Udta Punjab has successfully carved into the minds of the ‘General’ Indian population). I don’t like to talk a lot nor do I talk loudly nor am I proud of my (lack of) physical capabilities to beat someone.  Not only stereotypes about me I fail to understand some stereotypes about other people too. I don’t understand how every black person is considered to be from South India or how ignorant someone can be to consider every South Indian a Madrasi or how every Punjabi is supposed to have a great liquor holding capacity.

My history teacher once praised Delhi Punjabis in class about the way they treat their guests (as a result of which I have started to observe my family very carefully every time we have guests over) and I can’t deny that it fed my inner ego and made me feel good about being a Punjabi from Delhi (although I fail to tick mark most of the checkboxes of a Delhi Punjabi). 

Being in a different city so far away from home I do get asked a lot of questions about Delhi & Punjab and their cultures and over time it has somehow settled into my brain to classify myself as a Punjabi from Delhi even though I haven’t understood my own culture really well myself.  I don’t like to classify myself but I have to label myself in order for people to have a better understanding of who I am ‘in general’ since it is much tougher to explain to people that there can be someone who doesn’t follow a religion but is not an atheist, someone can criticize the government and not be anti-national, someone can be fair and yet be from South India, someone can have a name in Urdu and yet belong to a Hindu Family, someone can look like a person from Nepal and yet be an Indian.

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2 weeks in a new city

So I’ve recently started with college and its been 2 weeks since I moved here and there is a lot that you start to think about it, yet all those thoughts don’t seem to overwhelm your mind. 

Adulthood

I remember my last post where I talked about how being 18 doesn’t really change anything except a number related to you and I now seem to realise how wrong I was. It isn’t really the birthday which brings the change from you being a kid to an adult, it is the onset of new experiences in your life which start once you’re 18 that bring in that change. You become more independent (you’re supposed to become independent at least). You have to make certain decisions which up till this point of time your parents made for you, decisions you never thought about. Handling finances, living alone, planning out certain aspects of your life which you never thought about, there are certain things which make you realise that being an adult constitutes much more than being able to drive legally, cast a vote and drink/smoke legally in some cases.

College

One thing a lot of people generally do think about is how they’re going to live away from home which somehow wasn’t even there on the list of things I should be worried about because one of the main reasons for me choosing this college was to go to a new city and go away from home and have as much distance from my past life as I could to understand how I adapt to change and it isn’t as easy as I thought. 

When you enter a classroom full of over 60 people with whom you have to spend 5 years and you have over 250 other people in other classes it is a bit tough to get accustomed to this strange environment where you don’t know anyone. I’ve spent my entire life in one school so once I joined there would be about 10 new admissions whose name I would have to remember each new year and it is much more easier to remember the names of 10 new people divided into about 5-6 sections of about 30 people than it is to remember names of over 300 people divided into 5 sections of over 60 people each. Furthermore when you have people from all parts of the country in one classroom there isn’t a certain uniformity of names for people from different regions have very different names including certain names which you find very hard to pronounce and have never heard before. After about 2 weeks of going to college I even though know a lot of names, I can’t seem to match names and faces.

Another different aspect of college is the fact that unlike in school where you had one teacher teaching one subject, you have one teacher who may teach different subjects in different years of college and sometimes even the same year of college and you can have multiple teachers teaching the same subject. The whole method of teaching is still a bit tough for me to understand coming from a system of education where everything was dictated to us. The lectures in college are much more opinionated and a few professors are open to opinion as well regarding the subject. You don’t need to maintain a notebook as such and you yourself have to try to understand what is important and what is not important in the lecture. The one aspect which I do like very much is the whole method of assessment, where a written test is very rarely used for internal assessments and the final examination will not be based entirely on the primary reading material provided.

When I first thought of going to college I had one idea in mind and that was that I have 5 years in front of me that I probably will never relive again and I have to make the most of it and in order to do that I need to loosen up and change the way I am as a person but it isn’t as easy as thinking of doing it when you’re not in college. At home I tried to plan out what all aspects of my life I was going to change, what I was going to do and what I’m not going to do but I failed to think about the different aspects of myself that I do not wish to change in the next 5 years. You understand what you’re going to change but you never seem to consider to what level you’re willing to bring that change.  There are certain aspects of your personality which you cannot force yourself into bringing a change into. I as a person who has remained shy and very much introverted for at least the initial 16 years of my life, and for someone who isn’t very good at conversations, it is tough for me to talk to someone for too long on something in order for me to become better acquainted with such a person as much as I would love to be able to talk on any topic with anyone it is a trait which I can’t develop just by telling myself to bring in that change.

This has turned out to be one of my longest posts and it is a bit tough to understand how 2 weeks in a new city can change the way I think entirely.

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Have you ever had the thought of running away just to be alone? And decided not to do that because you think your parents will blame themselves?

I have and the reason for me to not do that had very little to do with my parents. I was about 13 or 14 when I considered this so I don’t recall the exact reason for not doing so, but it had more to do with friends than with family and even more to do with me finding myself incapable to survive in the world outside.

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Eighteen

About 2 Months ago I turned 18 and people look forward to turn 18 all their lives, it is supposed to be a big event in the life of any kid because once you're 18 you supposedly become an adult. The same boring event and parties that you've had for the previous 17 years somehow get a new meaning this year, although in my case there weren't really any parties the past years because of me not being very fond of my own birthday. I think its just another number, because well all that really changes is with that day is a number that is associated with you, a number humans refer to as age. There isn't much of a change really, I just become eligible to vote and drive for the most part, you can watch adult movies and dont need to lie about being 18 and have legal ID proofs to show it, some people get big lectures by family and friends about responsibilities and in most cases 18 year olds are finished with school so being done with school is kind of nice too. Its only after you turn 18 that you realise that all the hype there was before your 18th was just a bunch of crap really. You hope for the day you're 18 and done with school and no one can interfere with your life and you wish to be a free bird in the open sky out of your cage, nothing to stop you but the reality is you're just in a bigger cage where you can now spread your wings but still can't fly. You're trapped really, I always wanted to work towards my dream of making music and even though I still have it, my education has suddenly become my number one priority, a priority that 6 months ago I gave 0 fucks about. I ended up working hard for 2 months before boards because apparently people think you fail in life if you dont get atleast 90 in boards and then I went back to giving 0 fucks during march and still ended up scoring 87%. A guy who failed mathematics for the past 2 years gets a 86/100 and the people who got a 95 the past two years are still at a 95 and honestly boards are just a big joke conducted every year and once you're done with them, you realize you have to appear for entrances for which I actually gave a fuck and studied hard but didn't really get much out of it which is was probably the first time I failed after actually working hard. Its so fucked up seeing a guy who would ask people to not give up on their dreams letting his own dreams take a back seat because survival became too important for him than his own happiness.