I can hear the celebrations from the other side of the hostel block. It is indeed a busy day for us. Today we have had five PPO offers and there is a birthday boy too, so you can imagine the amount of celebration required.
There is a marked difference between the way I wrote an article a month back and what I am writing now. ‘I’ has already become ‘we’, ‘their’ PPO is already ‘ours’. In fact, it has come to the point that my mistake is everybody’s mistake (trust me that is a huge reassurance here).
Getting to this point has not been a cakewalk I will agree. But all 180 of us were in the same boat and that helps a lot.
Looking out for each other is something that we learnt the fun way. I particularly remember this one task wherein we were asked by the professor to take a walk around the campus and to observe certain things related to our course. At the end of the allotted time, we all came back sans one group. And we did not even realize it. When they came half an hour later, the entire class welcomed them with an applause! I think that they took the idea of a walk a bit too seriously. Now whenever we go out, we always remember to look out for our friends and bring them back with us, no matter how much we want to join them ourselves. The importance of
adhering to deadlines cannot be emphasized more here. If the class starts at 9:00 AM, the professor will close the door at 9:00 AM sharp, even if he sees you just ten meters away from the door. So we
never, and I mean never
, leave the room without waking up our roommates if they have a class coming up, even if we have to shout on the top of our voices to wake them up. Getting late is not an option. This is what brings all of us together and the existence here is
symbiotic. People depend on you and you depend on your batch and this ensures collective success. It is not uncommon to find a statistics major teaching the art students the nitty-gritty of the subject in the academic building, into the wee hours of the night.
As I sit and write this article, I look back and a smile flits across my face as I remember the first week here, all 180 of us unsure, in a new milieu, and I sit and reflect on how far I have come, from the day I entered the institute, to this day, where I now stand as a member of the Public Relations Cell. I am - transported back to the night I got my interview results. I was on
cloud nine before, I am on cloud nine now. But then again, this is Meghalaya, so there is a piece of cloud nine for everyone here. I can’t help but remember these lines by Theodore Roethke,
“In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places “