Here I am, finally. After a long time, the desire to key something down has re-kindled in me, partly inspired by the blogs of some of my friends and partly due to the guilt of letting this blog go unattended. The last week has been eventful. The placement thing, the resume writing, the convocation, the confluence of my friends back in IIT, Malharfest etc. has left me with some mixed feelings in the end. The convocation is a great event; its grand nature, the pride and happiness on the faces of students, exceeded only by the pride and happiness of their parents, is an indicative of the pleasure that hardwork, success and achievement (in that order only) bring along with them. One of the proudest moments that a student can ever experience is receiving the President's Gold Medal, indicative of a student's superlative intelligence and dedication. There has not been an occasion when I have not gone misty-eyed after attending an IIT's convocation. Watching my friends gleefully receive their respective degrees left me with a sense of sorrow, and a burning desire to be with them out there stretching my hands towards the director in anticipation. I wanted to get out of IIT, face the world, meet the challenges and yet here I was reconciled to the fact there was a long way to go before that could happen.
Money, one may believe or disregard it, has certainly become one of the world's prime desirable object. And placements bring us closer to our tryst with the materialistic world and its pleasures. The temptation to get a job, to earn some money is too overwhelming to be taken lightly. After all, money has become the only solution to all the problems that confront the human kind in this world. We spent a great amount of time preparing our curriculum-vitae, full of honest yet mysterisouly misleading facts about ourselves, with the intention to somehow project ourselves as someone better than what we are. The game of placements makes an interesting one and I somehow tend to think the opponent party is well aware of our tricks, howsoever adroitly we may try to conceal them. Yet the game is played and we all expect to be the winner.
One of the most over-hyped events in the college scenes here in Mumbai is the Malharfest. Though it commands an appreciable participation from colleges in and around Mumbai, the event in itself is highly dry and provides absolutely no environment of enjoyment unlike IIT Bombay during one-of-a-kind Mood Indigo. There are too many officials, volunteers, co-ordinators touting radio sets, talking loudly in them, looking scornfully at everyone else as if they are all there with the sole intention to sabotage their precious event. Countless number of restrictions on people's movements and complicated rules and procedures for registration only adds to a general college going dude's frustration. Amidst all this chaos, one finds students, in the most outlandish of all clothes, trying to look more beautiful than each other and failing miserably. Young women and men flaunting their sexuality, and nothing else, in a desperate bid to grab attention of everyone else. And there are some for who even just clothes or lack of them won't matter. They must wear on their arm a specimen of the human species of the opposite sex as if announcing a trophy of their youthful beauty, an indication of their status above the common general public like us, made even more profound by the scowl that they wear on their face whenever they happen to throw a glance in our direction. All this exhibition only makes me smile to myself as I return back to my hostel by a train running amidst scores of people living in the filth of urban life oblivious to all that was going on within the four walls of the St. Xavier's college.
