During my four years at University, two voices constantly peered into my mind struggling to expose to the outward. A persistent fear plagued me, later I realized it was fear of peer and the surmounting pressure to deviate from a social nous. Now as I start to write exactly after sixteen months of graduating into an Engineer, I divert from an unusually typical face I'd put on to the usual atypical that I am. And acknowledgements to my Professor - Mr. Goel for triggering off this initiative.
For those of you that may wonder why I chose to bombard Shakespeare at a worthy substitute for a Trafalgar, it comes with a quantum leap from being merely a connoisseur to a critical resource. No, neither am I Superman nor a Reporter picturing at pivotal events. I do not do data. So, I bomb Shakespeare with much delight and leave the rest to your interpretation.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players
The World indeed is a stage; it stages God's Imagination. We are His Imagination. He created us, some to bring variety to music, a few at poetry, a couple thousands he drew into painting and other forms of Arts and Logical Reasoning amounting to what we call today as Sciences. The rest, he created as means to subscribe to his worldly imagination in the form of the four elements - water, air, earth, fire. Much like a Magician's Wand, these four elements act as change-agents always feeding into us their indispensable presence.
Without much further ado, let's take you back five years in timeline when I had stepped out of school. Clothed in a gleaming blue blazer, I held a candle as my Principal forwarded to me with a carefully weighted smile amidst measured exclamations, and she whispered tenderly into my ears, “Let there be light". A laminated farewell letter signed in ink was handed over to us by her, the later portions of which I found to be one of the most inspiring and moving notes I've read so far. I have carefully preserved in deeper chambers of my cupboard and let me today share with you a few words that it contained.
“John W. Gardner rightly felt that the world is, among everything a vale of tears. It is full of absurdities that cannot be explained, evils that cannot be countered, injustices that cannot be excused. The individual, who does understand, is disarmed in a hazardous environment.
But then there is a resilience of the human spirit. Hope runs deeper than intellectual appraisal. We were designed for struggle, for survival and to irrepressibly strive towards the light. Our conscious processes - the part of us that is saturated with words and ideas - may arrive at exceedingly gloomy appraisals, but an older, more deeply rooted, biologically and spiritually stubborn part of us continues to say 'Yes' to hope, 'Yes' to struggle, 'Yes' to life.
However, remember there is no short cut to success, there is no equivalent to hard work, and there is always room at the top.
"Upward and outward" always."
Notice how she signs off the letter. As we move upward, ideally we ought to incline towards our outward thus exploring new depths, creating meaning in trivial associations and seeking to derive true happiness as we rocket upward. My knowledge of complex numbers slowly transcends beyond the obvious to a more logical mind, and creates a unique equation. If we are products of His Imagination and the stage also be imaginary, we gradually descent, down the plane thus inverting our axes if we are to multiply forces with this universe seeking outward meaning at the cost of attempting to rocket upward. The plane we generate at such expense doesn't shoot up. The world is not a stage. It is for real, and it is evolving. We are actors forever adding constructively to his ploy and it is only with our integrating acts that we evolve into greater civilizations. Actors we must be. Shakespeare went wrong. Like he has with sending across correct message to his audience with Romeo and Juliet serving as twin flames in his massive tragedy of what Plato described to be beneficial to humanity. Shakespeare now silently rests amidst fairy tales and ferns, and I am glad we see less of his twists and turns.
In my introductory year at University, I played a wailing mourner to a seat missed at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology despite much effort. The transition from school to college was wide. School to us was a haven, cultivating and culminating each of our interests. From photography to calligraphy, quizzing to computing and rock climbing to diving - we did it all. And with the highest quality of delivery. College would be different, was a thought I had planted in my mind early as I carefully sheltered my sandpaper only to perhaps use later in life, sometime after school was over. It turned true.
During my initial years, I often wondered at setting across digital circuits on the breadboard while arranging in a structured manner as to how logically I would fit in the Function Generator and generate waveforms across clipping and clamping diodes on the Oscilloscope while others would perform similar tasks speedily. This transformation from electrical circuits in high school to solving Irodov problems outside it and now graduating to apply in real world scenarios took more time to register in my brain as I tried to co-relate every motion and movement of minutely charged particles inside a medium as propelled by electrical forces. Caught among subsidizing Multiplexers and De-multiplexers during first semester, I learnt only how they add to relevant areas of study much later. I was at a loss, others weren't. To them Multiplexers and De-Multiplexers were as much of an imagination as was Asterix and Tintin. Engineering was not serious business and I failed to realize early, thus adding to my woes.
As a kid, I could not distinguish between an Elvis King doing a hound dog to suspicious minds, until I later grew old enough to treat the former as a plausible cause to the latter. Oh come on, just figuratively. I would barely be able to rock and waltz back to either of these tunes and Anoop Jalota would sound just fine to me singing alongside Elvis when I was all of seven.
And so I drifted from being my natural self to an utterly unexpressed, less motivated yet maturing adult who is no way could find a means or mode to express his keenness to maturing creativity. I was caught between two worlds. A world when I was once a change-agent to now this world, constantly seeking that desired change. The change never happened. I was once a musician, I would sing at churches and concerts. As strings were pulled and curtains raised, I sang to the glee of crowds crazed. Now here, the buzz around was restricted to scintillating motors and discharging garage punk loudly playing in hostel rooms. Suddenly Dylan became trivia and Linkin Park turned demi-gods.
"Hey, you don't admire LP?", asked one as the other frowned as I drowsed to stranger tracks by Jal. It was a trap. I could not change, and no - I could not bring about a change either. So where do national incidents of importance and critical improvements in world history, politics and philosophy, religion and technology find its place 'neath our ever-piling Morris Mano and Ullman, I asked as I succumbed to rigorous pressure imposed upon me and by now, I had started to slide newspapers down my course books and evoke parallel study to maintain my sanity. There was a tsunami read one, as another recorded reactions over marketing policies adopted by Google. As the rest worked their way towards memorizing lengthy equations and fancying jobs at a Google, here they tried branding through with 'Don't be Evil' slogans, while I grinned at myself when I spotted thirty similar assignments lying on the instructor's table. Very soon, I was to become the thirty first - I did not know.
Often we are told that Engineering is an application of Science. Science proposes, engineering constructs. Here it was different many a time. Algorithms were proposed, applications were sought. Theories embraced a class of a two hundred-strong, and they applied to each other- I dare say, its consequences. Sometimes I wondered why we were never made to feel special. More important, more significant so as to herald changes and act as developers to induce or propose a new theory - the applications to which could easily be suggested by our less- imaginative peers. Don't publish; do not proclaim to be accurate either. But what stands as benchmarking ability raises one's significance and inspires not only him but motivates the rest to achieve a similar peak. Who for hell-sake bothers to care for a Rob Roy that devised an efficient theory or suggested a more optimized algorithm at search through multiple pages! Aren't we aiming at Google, folks?
Now, the tables turned. They did care. I didn't. Perhaps I wasn't bright enough to make to Google. Maybe college nurtured in such a way so that students could counter and overcome their shortcomings at being smart deliverers of change and innovation and hence create whatever impact through smart coding practices. Till date, I cannot write a single block of code without having to scan through syntax. And now that's called dexterity. When you perform a thousand tasks all through the years and sit down to develop massive chunks of code, you should enjoy certain relaxations on savoring syntactic sugar. I could always structure programs well, and forever knew how to go about a problem. However my lack of coordinating language with computing facilities always has been a shortcoming. Even as I write now, I strain to correlate and break up words to be able to arrive at output of certain practices while at programming. They say American education is smart, and there was a reason for it. I knew now.
It is a pitiful irony of life that we cannot relate sliding back in time to sliding down in line to evolve further. Such is education. The more we learn, the sooner we forget. Unfortunately, mine worked a lot different. The greater I learnt, the more powerful I assumed to be. Hence, all education I had procured, when all knowledge I had accumulated in previous years appeared to be wasted, I no longer proved to be valuable to the institution. No informed soul ever knew I could write, or sing and quiz, or debate and poeticize. Well informed about my future aspirations, I had clearly decided that if I were to venture out to explore such avenues, I would not take up Engineering. But, there is heartwarming delight and of course satisfaction derived in creating works and getting acknowledged for the beauty of it rather than commerce. That did not happen either. With a bloated ego and more angst, I became the subject of mockery and ridicule when I tried to jam together arts, aesthetics, taste and sciences with grace.
To those that are yet to bomb Shakespeare, I recall one of my experiences at a Database Lab in my second year when we had been instructed to create multiple tables and operate joins on them. As an example, I had cited the popular football manager game and proposed a likely solution to the join. However, with strategic and intensely involving games such as this, it is sometimes enormously difficult to cast-down shooting games such as Counter Strike that are the most popular among hostel students. Folks, we are seeds of imagination. The world however, is not. Lay down in clear words my statement as I submit with forceful claims that correct imagination, experiences and wisdom when applied to real world objects that arise through human needs are the greatest gifts that any university has to offer to humankind. So far, barring the fourth and final year - I see none where I could actually exercise my wisdom and knowledge into exposing areas that require human interest, effort and exploration. Much has to do with imbalanced distribution of grades, assigned while working in teams and groups I could never ever build or configure. A lot has to do with different socio-economic backgrounds of entering students, gross classification of overall purpose of academic study and vast generalizations made and accepted by the teaching body that must be made aware that not all want to pocket data that comes at a cost but some to enhance data into knowledge and apply consequent wisdom.
We know of malpractices adopted by the HR in Indian IT industry at recognizing skillful and appropriate resources apt for certain specific jobs that suit them. So it has been the case with university. Hopefully, someone someday will hear out my scream. Imagination can turn from good to great if applied to real world objects. If we anticipate the world to be a figment of our imagination thus chasing worldly pursuits, we are likely to vanish to dust after our lifetimes. All we would leave behind will instead soil this stage of his and unfortunately, the world as a stage like Shakespeare described will contain very few remains after each act that could string along reels of a movie that sees in its end - a happy prosperous world.
The playing field was never even. For the purpose of academics now saw a switch over to material pursuits than self-fulfillment towards love, light and enlightenment. I was alone through my entire journey, in these four long years. In between, I have had my moments of angst, misery and extreme pain. But I took it on the chin. Instead of shunning my dark years, I now heave a sigh of relief when I realize how much more I could have done to myself and with myself if I were as unrestrained like in school. There is a glimmer, a light at the end of the tunnel and that is the day tomorrow. When darkness looms upon us, and leaves us spotless in the end - it truly is a wonderful feeling. I learnt to be nonreactive to all I was exposed to in those four years. I was passive, and now when I look at it - I feel just as I was when I had turned eighteen. Those words have forever become a part of me, they echo in my mind seeding for a change within and always branching outward - "an older, more deeply rooted, biologically and spiritually stubborn part of us continues to say 'Yes' to hope, 'Yes' to struggle, 'Yes' to life".
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