So I am back here after a very long time. Makes me
wonder, why do I harbor such an overarching desire to revisit things. It's
just something with the way memory works, I reckon. There isn't a single phase
of my life that I haven't found luxuriantly lame while in that phase, and that
I haven't yearned for when past it. School was a drag, the most boring place
ever; there was nothing too abject about it, but there was nothing remarkable
either. Why languish, I used to wonder. But at DCE, I yearned for the almost
gilded civility of my Defence School life when, as a freshman, I witnessed
hooligans banging hard and hurling abuses at my hostel room's closed door. Oh,
and the intolerably tasteless mess food. Soon, the teakwood desks of my high-school,
its teachers' proper English accents, the colored chalks for the blackboard,
and water and soap in the lavatories, would all come back to me in an epiphany
as the pinnacle of human civilization, which I had hitherto been dumb enough to
not appreciate.
But is DCE a bad memory? No. No memory, if you wait long enough, is a bad memory; and DCE is a particularly delightful one. In many ways, I became what I have become as a person, during the four years I spent there. The DCE hostel was my first experience of having a room all to myself, and consequently, the first time in my life that I read eclectically, indiscriminately, copiously and in isolation. That life, of being alone in my room with a timeless master's brilliant words for hours and hours, was unlike any I had experienced till then or have since. I was swept off my feet time after time after time, by Camus, by Wallace, by Kafka, by Banville, by Housman, by Chekov, by Trevor. It was the unspeakability of those experiences, their unsharability with my college friends, which made them obliquely surreal, and made me appreciate my college friends in a way I never could my school friends.
It was during my DCE days that I first felt an emotion that resembled what is in public discourse referred to as love. It is probably the seeming impossibility of feeling that emotion again, that makes me revisit myself sitting every evening on the stairs of the colossal Ambadeep building on KG Mark Connaught Place and talking fondly about Surbhi with Rohit, who too, as luck would have it, loved her. Countless Bollywood movies have played the cliché of love vs friend, but living it was quite something else. Thankfully, the interesting tale was short-lived in real time, longlived as it may be in my memory, thankfully again.
I made friends with Kavish and Rohit during DCE, and for that alone I should have loved it. But I didn't. I always dreamt of leaving DCE. I used to perform back-of-the-envelope calculations in my sophomore year to see how long it would take me to pass all the remaining exams. 8 hours of preparation per exam times 8 exams per semester times 5 remaining semesters. Just 320 hours, why couldn't they be the next 320 hours of my life, I mulled. No sooner had I graduated from DCE to my first job than I realized it was all too soon.
I liked my job, very much even. The sheer puzzle-like nature of the activity enthralled me. But reading a little too much in my college life had made me perilously exposed to the concept of purpose. I saw no purpose in merely making money, I couldn't feel motivated to breathe every breath and think every thought in the pursuit of profit for eleven hours every day. Interesting as the work is, it is true that all a trader does is seek profit - no more, no less. All the claptrap about adding value to the world, making markets work, (here's a good one) providing liquidity to the 'system', is of course self-satisfying hogwash. Sometimes I found myself turning my head away from my own computer and gazing blankly at a bunch of my colleagues staring attentively at their myriad screens for the next little cue that would grant the next few hundred dollars to their paychecks. I found it infinitely depressing for some reason I understand but cannot really explain. Depressing as it was, boy have I missed it since I left it. No other job, to my mind, has been as continually edge-of-the-seat exciting as that one was.
Soon after college, I had once again fallen in what seems like love. It wasn't shortlived, and unlike the previous time, was quite full-blown. When it ended three years later, I knew the departure had been coming for quite some time. Long, long before the formal ceasing of things, I had seen, to use Seth's poetic words, somewhere within her heart the heart to leave. Probably she was a kind soul who thought I was weak and wouldn't survive her going away too well. Probably I was. Probably I didn't. Her previous boyfriend had attempted numerous suicides and left the both of us rather shaken, and it must have played on her mind for a long time to avoid the same situation with me. But it is difficult for me to rationalize my own behavior, in retrospect, for I cannot fathom why I fervently wanted for things to continue while having seen the falsehood of it very much in time. After the end of it, I was tormented by dreams of her previous boyfriend who had called me up a couple of times in the very early days of this affair, and screamed at and cried to and abused me. For months, I hesitated to go to sleep for fear of this recurring nightmare. I wondered if this was all karma.
With a story as unpleasant as that, one would guess that this relationship would be a bad memory, and for a while it was. But as with all things, after a suitably long time elapses, only the goodness lasts, and the good parts of this particular phase far outshine my life's other best moments. Many of them revolved around baring myself entirely before another person. I realized what a leap of faith that requires, and how cathartic and otherworldly it can be if you can take that leap. Today those days are just a fond remembrance, and manifest themselves every day in the songs I hum driving to and from work, the same songs I sung to her and was ridiculed for, all in good humor. The humor of those moments still lingers in a smile on my face as I glide on these beautiful Plainsboro roads looking out of the windows, once again, as I drive, just as I did as a small kid being sent to school in the school-bus for the first time.
My current days are full of working my ass out with my best friend whose name I have taken earlier in this post. After spending anywhere from ten to twelve hours at work, I start working on my primary thing, the software projects, the open source work, the startup we've been trying to get off the ground. For days I would work like a man possessed and in fact feel good about myself, but once every ten days or so, I would take an off day, feeling frustrated and hopeless and almost defeated. I question whether I'm doing something of value. I question myself as someone who even has the makings of an entrepreneur and more often than not end up with an adverse judgement - I am not a true entrepreneur. True entrepreneurs work hard, learn relentlessly, but they learn stuff to build things. I am fairly convinced that I, on the other hand, build things to learn stuff. It's a subtle distinction but I wonder whether I am an academic soul pushing himself vainly as an entrepreneur. And then there are the everyday failures. And I sure as hell do crib. A lot.
Hopefully, when these days have passed long enough to become a memory, it will be my favourite memory.
But is DCE a bad memory? No. No memory, if you wait long enough, is a bad memory; and DCE is a particularly delightful one. In many ways, I became what I have become as a person, during the four years I spent there. The DCE hostel was my first experience of having a room all to myself, and consequently, the first time in my life that I read eclectically, indiscriminately, copiously and in isolation. That life, of being alone in my room with a timeless master's brilliant words for hours and hours, was unlike any I had experienced till then or have since. I was swept off my feet time after time after time, by Camus, by Wallace, by Kafka, by Banville, by Housman, by Chekov, by Trevor. It was the unspeakability of those experiences, their unsharability with my college friends, which made them obliquely surreal, and made me appreciate my college friends in a way I never could my school friends.
It was during my DCE days that I first felt an emotion that resembled what is in public discourse referred to as love. It is probably the seeming impossibility of feeling that emotion again, that makes me revisit myself sitting every evening on the stairs of the colossal Ambadeep building on KG Mark Connaught Place and talking fondly about Surbhi with Rohit, who too, as luck would have it, loved her. Countless Bollywood movies have played the cliché of love vs friend, but living it was quite something else. Thankfully, the interesting tale was short-lived in real time, longlived as it may be in my memory, thankfully again.
I made friends with Kavish and Rohit during DCE, and for that alone I should have loved it. But I didn't. I always dreamt of leaving DCE. I used to perform back-of-the-envelope calculations in my sophomore year to see how long it would take me to pass all the remaining exams. 8 hours of preparation per exam times 8 exams per semester times 5 remaining semesters. Just 320 hours, why couldn't they be the next 320 hours of my life, I mulled. No sooner had I graduated from DCE to my first job than I realized it was all too soon.
I liked my job, very much even. The sheer puzzle-like nature of the activity enthralled me. But reading a little too much in my college life had made me perilously exposed to the concept of purpose. I saw no purpose in merely making money, I couldn't feel motivated to breathe every breath and think every thought in the pursuit of profit for eleven hours every day. Interesting as the work is, it is true that all a trader does is seek profit - no more, no less. All the claptrap about adding value to the world, making markets work, (here's a good one) providing liquidity to the 'system', is of course self-satisfying hogwash. Sometimes I found myself turning my head away from my own computer and gazing blankly at a bunch of my colleagues staring attentively at their myriad screens for the next little cue that would grant the next few hundred dollars to their paychecks. I found it infinitely depressing for some reason I understand but cannot really explain. Depressing as it was, boy have I missed it since I left it. No other job, to my mind, has been as continually edge-of-the-seat exciting as that one was.
Soon after college, I had once again fallen in what seems like love. It wasn't shortlived, and unlike the previous time, was quite full-blown. When it ended three years later, I knew the departure had been coming for quite some time. Long, long before the formal ceasing of things, I had seen, to use Seth's poetic words, somewhere within her heart the heart to leave. Probably she was a kind soul who thought I was weak and wouldn't survive her going away too well. Probably I was. Probably I didn't. Her previous boyfriend had attempted numerous suicides and left the both of us rather shaken, and it must have played on her mind for a long time to avoid the same situation with me. But it is difficult for me to rationalize my own behavior, in retrospect, for I cannot fathom why I fervently wanted for things to continue while having seen the falsehood of it very much in time. After the end of it, I was tormented by dreams of her previous boyfriend who had called me up a couple of times in the very early days of this affair, and screamed at and cried to and abused me. For months, I hesitated to go to sleep for fear of this recurring nightmare. I wondered if this was all karma.
With a story as unpleasant as that, one would guess that this relationship would be a bad memory, and for a while it was. But as with all things, after a suitably long time elapses, only the goodness lasts, and the good parts of this particular phase far outshine my life's other best moments. Many of them revolved around baring myself entirely before another person. I realized what a leap of faith that requires, and how cathartic and otherworldly it can be if you can take that leap. Today those days are just a fond remembrance, and manifest themselves every day in the songs I hum driving to and from work, the same songs I sung to her and was ridiculed for, all in good humor. The humor of those moments still lingers in a smile on my face as I glide on these beautiful Plainsboro roads looking out of the windows, once again, as I drive, just as I did as a small kid being sent to school in the school-bus for the first time.
My current days are full of working my ass out with my best friend whose name I have taken earlier in this post. After spending anywhere from ten to twelve hours at work, I start working on my primary thing, the software projects, the open source work, the startup we've been trying to get off the ground. For days I would work like a man possessed and in fact feel good about myself, but once every ten days or so, I would take an off day, feeling frustrated and hopeless and almost defeated. I question whether I'm doing something of value. I question myself as someone who even has the makings of an entrepreneur and more often than not end up with an adverse judgement - I am not a true entrepreneur. True entrepreneurs work hard, learn relentlessly, but they learn stuff to build things. I am fairly convinced that I, on the other hand, build things to learn stuff. It's a subtle distinction but I wonder whether I am an academic soul pushing himself vainly as an entrepreneur. And then there are the everyday failures. And I sure as hell do crib. A lot.
Hopefully, when these days have passed long enough to become a memory, it will be my favourite memory.
