Time and the hour runs through the roughest day
Ever since my bad run started, things went from bad to worse with an alarming consistency. My morale dropped and was at a low for a long time. In one of my previous posts I recounted with a philosophical perspective of all that went wrong and so that part I am going to skip today.
In a nutshell it was an awesome winter vacation. I was well on my way to recovery and therefore decided to celebrate Christmas with family and friends in a great style. From 27th to 31st December, I spent my time visiting various food joints with an ever changing group of friends. From 1st January to 4th January, I attended a Jazz concert, went for two movies, and had a night out with some old school friends.
Then came coding week. Actually it is a 10 days long event which I entered 3 days late. So from 4th to 11th, I barely bathed, slept and only emerged from my room for mealtimes. Also I noticed that many of my classmates who were hitherto uninterested in coding as a serious activity, started gaining speed as well. This sudden surge of interest in coding amidst our peer group accelerated exponentially, and five of us spent the last three days of the contest constantly debating and arguing about algorithms. Indeed, I gained about twice as much knowledge in the field of coding, than I learnt in a year at college.
End result was that I topped my peer group and also ranked fifth in entire college. It was a huge morale booster. The next week I spent entire days trying to come up with a thesis for my undergraduate project work. I put so much of attention into this task and my mother was forced to break into my room and physically drag me to the bathroom for a bath.
Around 12th I got a request to form a team with two of my juniors in college for a certain report writing competition. Writing being the only thing I actually love, I immediately accepted. Then in the evening I came to know it was to be hosted at IIT Kharagpur and the event would last 3 days. That meant three nights away from home, just one month into my recovery.
Naturally there was a lot of tension at home, but after some incredibly complex negotiations I got the green light. Over the next few days I got busy preparing for the preliminaries and the hard work paid off pretty well (we qualified in second place).
The day before I was leaving, I came across a Lamborghini on the road. Trust me, that was enough to make my vacation memorable on its own. Funny thing was, I had so much happening around me that save for a Facebook post I literally got no other opportunity to gloat about it at all.
The D-Day arrived and I set off for IIT with mixed feelings. Here I was about to visit my dream institute which I had failed to enter, twice. On the other hand here I was finally heading off to my dream institute. What happened there will always be a great part of me, and maybe a story for another day. But what I remember most is, the moment the shuttle cab started pulling out of the IIT main entrance to take me home, I felt happier than I had been while entering the gates. Happier because the brilliance of IITs had dimmed slightly at last, and because the realization that not being in an IIT did not mean I was missing out on a whole lot.
This vacation will undoubtedly be one of my best ever, and the reason I chose not to elaborate on it is that the more I write about these 30 days, the less it will seem. Hence I limited myself to the essential facts with the hope that one day I will be able to sit down and extrapolate from this post, the various highs which appeared contiguously in a period so small, yet profound.
P.S. It’s been roughly two weeks since college started, and life refuses to fall into its daily monotony. In my opinion that’s the best epilogue possible for such an epic vacation.
Tasting life in retrospect 