THE STEPPING STONE

It had been a mistake, I'd always been certain of that... Fate would've favoured me more had I chosen 'The Road Less Travelled', as they put it... But I was sure that like the rest of the mistakes that I've made till today, this one was also not too huge, I wouldn't have to pay too dearly for it and that I'd be able to gloss over it... A little late, maybe, but I'd be able to do it for sure...

But today, a piece of news in the morning (and this was not about my internship :p) made me realise how this mistake was not a mistake... When God had planned it, he had meant it to be a stepping stone, a way for me to realising what I'd always truly wanted... something that I'd not known when I'd made the decision and my 'mistake', but something that I definitely now know to be true... through repeated introspective questioning, answering, loads of real-time situations and their results which I now treat as hard-core, tangible evidence.

It's a stepping stone... And now, it's going to be used as one.

:)

Lesson (re)learnt in June 09:

Bringing a smile to someone's face when he's close to tears can bring tears (of joy) to your own eyes...

Moral of the story on Nov 21, 2009:

Being there for someone when he's down and out can really reaffirm his faith in all that is beautiful in the world...

P.S. I had my microprocessor project submission today. After an unexplained run of good luck all through last semester, during which all my projects worked perfectly, this semester, my one and only project refused to even light up its LEDs(even after I'd spent the last two nights soldering the stupid thing meticulously, getting very little sleep in the process)... Spent the whole afternoon cursing the damned project while some friends worked selflessly at it.... even when they didn't have to... when they could've easily walked away....

I couldn't submit my project in the end... Coz when we finished with it, the teacher was gone... and he's on leave tomorrow (yes, this sunday is working in our college :p)which means i'll have to coax him into accepting it on monday... Frankly, i might have been perturbed about my non-working project before noon today, but now i don't even care what my prof will have to say on monday... I've got better things to be happy about... My reaffirmed faith... There are still a lot of things that are right with this world... :) :)

It’s official… I hate my college.

I hate the way things are done here, I hate the way they run this place and I hate the fact that I have to come here 5 days a week and see precious days of my life waste away into nothingness. I hate the fact that I always have to do some crappy work which neither excites me, nor thrills me, just makes me let out a huge, audible sigh. I hate the fact that sometimes, I see no target in front of me, no finishing line ahead of me.

But the flip side of this is that I’m also proud of being here… Maybe this wasn’t what I was expecting when I stepped into this place a year and a half back… Maybe this wasn’t what I had in mind when they told me “the college you’re going to go to is among the top 15 colleges of India”… But the fact is that I am proud of being here coz what I‘ve got today, is something that most parents would give loads of money (you know what I mean ;)) to let their children have; is something that most students work tirelessly towards for two long years… And if this is what India has to offer as “one of its best colleges”, then so be it. I’m not going to grumble my way through these 4 years… or, atleast that’s what I tell myself everyday:-/

So, here’s to another bout of optimism (though this may be because the holidays have just started and I’m getting my cheeriness back at the prospect of staying home and doing what I love everyday)… Here’s hoping that my sincere efforts to fall in love once again with this place like I did a year and a half back do bear fruit (coz of late I’ve gotten really bored calling this place names along with the rest of my friends :P and I do want my stay here to be a lot more enjoyable:))

P.S:
I think I owe everybody an explanation as to why I wrote this post. Well here it is… I got my grades a few days back and they were horrible…though not quite as horrible as some of the things the teachers did. Without taking any names (of the teachers or the benefitting students), I’ll give a brief overview of what all happened. In one subject, some students were given A’s even though they deserved mangy-looking C’s and hence, some of us deserving A’s had to be content with B’s and those deserving B’s had to be content with C’s. In another subject, promises made earlier regarding marking in quizzes were broken at the last moment (I can’t elaborate on this right now, it’s a long story). In yet another subject, marks were deducted for no reason at all and even then when we just made it to the cut-off for the much-coveted A-grade in the stupid subject, we were handed a B… coz they said, had we got ½ a mark more, we would have gotten an A, but no, ½ a mark less couldn’t be adjusted, sorry…

To top it all, I was the least lucky in my lab practical exam… got the worst experiment of the lot…had to perform that while the others sniggered… I don’t blame anyone for this though… Somebody had to get that experiment and I did... Just my luck…