When you are in school,
your parents tell you 10th boards are the hardest. They make it
sound like life beyond is so much easier than struggling to go to school every
day. So when the time comes, u gather up
all the stamina, put in tons of effort, toil through sleepless nights and
sacrifice your favourite TV shows , score to the best of your ability and gloat
with pride not knowing that you’ve just paved your own pathway to the next crucifix-10+2!
In
the light of previous experience, u decide to take it easy this time. After all,
if 10th was so simple, what
harm can a +2 do! Considering the fact that this time is peak teenage, there’s
way too much fun and way too less studying. In time, results come and regret
floods in (I’m talking only about cases like mine who played the fool to the
best of their abilities) for all that time “wasted”! The next 3 months are the
most painful, sitting at home watching every other smart one who played the
fool along with you but still managed to get a neat score get into the best
colleges for the best course. If you don’t
do an engineering course it becomes a prestige issue, mainly for the parents.
So amidst the constant nagging from all sides, including phony sympathy from
relatives far off, you wait until the portals of some institution opens just
for you(after all, every corner has it’s own engineering college these days
thank God!) and it’s a bliss! You take it up no matter what or where because it’s
an engineering degree after all.
Four years flyby of course giving you its own
share of suffering. Some survive and we call them engineers. Those who don’t,
either drop out half way or live long years writing never ending arrears. And
then you ask yourself what next? Is this it? That’s when you realize, this
never ends. It goes on and on... and on.. Every day is either about a
wise choice you made or failed to make. You write your own destiny be it for
the good or bad. You see life moving at a pace that you can’t handle sometimes
because there are a billion people around you who are smarter and better. Trying
to keep up easy but maintaining is hard. So be it an engineer or a doctor or a
teacher or a labourer, life becomes a puzzle that just leaves you wondering out
loud “Did I really have to grow up?!”
