Independence Day, 2009 - The real freedom...

This post is actually from my personal diary that I maintain in the form of a blog (and is only accessible to me). I have modified this post a bit in order to cater to the sensitivities of my readers.

I had a very fun-filled weekend for Independence Day in 2009. Since August 14th also was a holiday (festival of Janmashtami), it was a 3 day weekend. I had invited my college friend Jango to come over from Baroda and spend some time in Delhi, away from the dry state of Gujarat (It is dry, since alcohol is banned there).

Anyways, it was a good one, because Ujjal a.k.a. Anda, was also here in Delhi. It was not by chance though. I called Jango to come up and meet me and Ujjal because Ujjal had left his job and was about to go back home to Assam to prepare for GATE. I knew that this was perhaps the only time I could see Ujjal and Jango together, so I made sure that we three had a whale of a time. We went to a movie together (Kaminey, starring Shahid Kapoor), which was perhaps the first we three have seen together in a theatre. When I realized that, it was a strange feeling for me. After all, we were really close friends since our engineering days, and we had never even saw a movie together in the theatre!

Our friendship is sort of different from most of the others..We know that we can understand each other really well but also know that inspite of having nothing in common, we still have something in common that we do not know about. It's strange, but I will give one example that illustrates this point. Consider the series "The Big Bang Theory". It is perhaps one of the few TV series that I have dedicated a blogpost to (even one of my all-time favorites "LOST" does not have its own post). I loved the series so much that I was in awe of the characterization and Penny :) If you know Anda well enough, you would think "He would never like that show". Well, Anda liked it so much, that he even recommended it to Jango. Knowing Jango, one would never imagine that he, of all people, would actually like that show! But he did, and that too very much! Well, this is not the only example, but it just shows that you may think you know someone, but you never do know him/her well enough.

Well, about that last statement of mine - on Sunday, we met Sushanth Gaurav, whom I call "the one-man placement guy". He left his job too, but for another job with more responsibilities. He met us at the Madras Cafe and it was nice seeing all of us back together. It was sort of a mini NIT KKR meeting for all of us. Anyways, we had some beer in the night and both Ujjal and Sushant agreed to stay over that night. Lucky for me, my roommate was at home in Bikaner and I was comfortable enough on the sofa.

When we were relaxing with the bottle of beer in our hands, our conversation with Sushant was getting warmer. Since he was one of the few fellas in our college who has access to all the information, we got to know of so many things regarding our college and its students, especially those from our own batch.

This conversation started right from the time we were in Madras Cafe and proceeded to KFC, and McDonalds and then to my place. We chatted about everything under the sun in NIT Kurukshetra. Then the night heated up, as Sushanth told us about the many different dirty secrets that we never knew of - about the presence of homosexuality in out college (which I frankly found quite disturbing) and the various sexcapades (both straight and not so straight) of our final-year batch-mates with guys and girls from all batches. Not many names were revealed to us, but there were quite a few things that we found out and had time to think over.

One of them that we seriously reflected on was our naivety in college. We were a bunch of guys who just came over to Engineering from Assam, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh - and all that we knew was what our parents told us "Beta, study hard and get a good job, and your life is settled". But there were the big fish - those that knew exactly what to do. And not surprisingly, most of them were from Haryana, the local region. Studying at a college in a area that you belong to has its own advantages - you can always get things done the way you want them to be done. We realized that while we were studying (somewhat hard), people were meeting and networking with teachers to get into their good books; while we idled our time drinking chai and having samosas at the khokha, they spent it on booze and girls. We were really very naive about the things we needed to get a good job and on how life really is.

But nature always devises a way to separate men from the boys. We were self-reliant and knew to tread our own paths. We had our heads on our shoulders and not up in the clouds. And  collectively, we have achieved, in our lives, far more than the other "pushed" fellas. We know what to do and how to enjoy life on our own terms. And when we thought about it - we realized that we were more successful in life than they are, because we have a sense of purpose in our lives!

Just think about it taking me as an example- there were so many guys in my college, who went though hell to study for CAT (I have seen people slog it out for months over CAT while I, who always talked about CAT, merely attended a crash course of 40 days duration), and there was me, the over-confident, egotistic, self-centered brat, who had more mood swings before CAT than the number of times Britney  must have thought of getting married in a month! Still, I got the 2nd best percentile of all the students in the college, and was in the top 200 students who gave what is supposedly "the toughest exam in the world". It was my destiny, and it happened.

I am happy to have realized that I went through college with a fair degree of honesty (I have had my share of wrongdoings) and got what I deserved, if not more. If God is really out there, I thank him for giving me what I need, nothing more and nothing less.

Sounds very different from what people generally perceive me to talk about and speak like? Well, this is the real me, and welcome to my world.

Ciao.