Author: Arja Kakkad
It’s 1 a.m. and you are in your bed, scrolling through the endless stories of the Prateek Kuhad concert yesterday that you didn’t go to. Your eyes hurt, you have a 10:10 class tomorrow, but sleep feels illegal, knowing there are countless people outside pulling all-nighters– to simply watch the sunrise or study for their impossibly difficult ‘Calc’ exam. Who said college years are the golden years of your life? Who forgot to tell me how heart-wrenching it was going to be to uproot myself from the comforts and clean bathrooms of my home to this 25-acre place a thousand kilometres away, my family fading into pixelated screens?
On call, my mother tells me of her day. Her trip to the dairy to buy paneer. The New Zealand vs South Africa match my parents watched. In our conversations, my absence in the passenger seat of the car and the sofa of the TV room lurks silently, like the elephant we don’t talk about. I bite back the lump in my throat and blink twice, my heartbeat drumming into my soul, my breathing hastening with every minute.
When relatives and friends back home well-meaningly ask me how college is going, I give them a tight-lipped smile and say it’s fun. In reality, I’m barely surviving. Trying my best to stay afloat in this massive, unfamiliar ocean, shivering in the icy waters (a mental note to go winter shopping at Sarojini asap), watching people around me nonchalantly discuss what they are going to dress for Halloween. People move around in large clusters- chattering, giggling, swapping inside jokes, enjoying their glorious freedom; I look at them, a convoluted feeling in my chest tightening slowly. Amongst this plethora of people, in the dying light of the premature dusk, I feel inexplicably alone.
Thursday night arrives in all its glory, my dorm floor teeming with people all decked up, anxious to claim the night as their own. (Can you guess the floor I am on?) Two hours later, as my friend and I sit in her room catching up on our readings, we hear the unmistakable roars of puking erupt outside like a toilet flushing in reverse. We wonder if we’re missing out on the ‘Thursday night’ experience, all the dorm parties we never got an invitation to, and the Thalassas and Green Squares we haven’t graced with our presence yet. What have we even done at college, if we have not puked our guts out and passed out in the commons later? Does college life really need to be ‘substantial’ to be substantial?
The transition to college is not easy. My problem is- why is no one acknowledging that? Why do I feel like I’m the only one left behind as others sprint ahead in social and academic spheres as if they were born into this college life? Is there no one out there struggling to breathe in this suffocating environment (quite literally)? Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. Maybe all of us are finding different ways to fill this void that has opened up in our lives after being torn away from our homes and our people– through blaring music and dancing on beds, through doom scrolling on Instagram and letting the algorithm pick up on your FOMO, or drowning in clubs and events and superficial conversations. Why aren’t we allowing ourselves time to adjust and settle into the overwhelming rhythm of life that college has orchestrated for us? Why have we put so much pressure on ourselves to forge lifelong friendships, figure out academics in the first go, land excellent internships, ‘live’ college life to the fullest?
A university like Ashoka, especially, is not an easy place to survive. It is both overwhelming and underwhelming, gets monotonous soon in the cramped space with the same people to wave at as you walk from the library to the mess thrice a day. It is passive-aggressively competitive and intimidating, a place where you can easily lose yourself, either to peer pressure or complete isolation.
It’s a challenge to hold onto your sense of self, your identity in a frustratingly chaotic place like this- where so much is happening and yet you find yourself bored. You have three assignments and 70 pages to read but you’re still standing at Kitkat for god knows what reason. Where there’s perpetual noise and yet an eerie silence that seeps into you like cold water trickling down your shirt. A lead-like unease you carry around inside of you, stoically attending classes and making insipid small talk in a feeble attempt to ease the burden. Clinging to tiny wooden logs to avoid drowning for the time being, is it enough? Is that how we are going to spend the next four years– in moments of fleeting happiness and perpetual discomfort?
Maybe it will get better. Maybe it won’t. Maybe I’ll find more of my people. Maybe I won’t. I think it’s high time that I, and everyone else who is secretly going through the same, realise that it’s okay to not like it here and still get through the day. It takes courage to admit it and still press forward. We must give ourselves time, and accept things as they come.
Till then, I find solace in Fuel Zone cold coffee and afternoon naps on the yellow library sofas. Finding silent companionship in shared meals and uniting in hatred for PoS. I have faith in the world. Even if nothing changes, it will help me acclimate myself to my surroundings. The air might turn my lungs into a chainsmoker’s, but I will emerge out of the four years stronger, more confident, and more resilient. For now, I’m just surviving, because, well, thriving is overrated anyway.
