The First Year — Part 1

Original date of writing: May 19, 2016

I got over with the first year of my college life just a few days back. Time for me has been faster than the speed of cars in the Furious series. Just feels like yesterday, when I was desperately waiting on my PC for the results of my class 12 to come out.

I scored more than what I expected and made it to a decent college. But the good college was far far away from my home. It was in a completely different city. I had only visited 2–3 other cities than Kolkata. The place where I got admission was in Chennai. Chennai is one of the major cities located in South India. In the words of a very close friend named BreakingBaid :

Basically, you are a Punjabi guy, who has lived his teen years in West Bengal and knows Bengali, who would now stay in South India for 4 years. I guess this is a good example of how diverse India is.

While I was traveling to Chennai, I and my father met an assistant professor who had hosted a seminar in my university a few years back. She got talking with my father and told him everything is good there except that there is a small problem regarding ragging. I was amazed as I had read that our campus was 100% ragging free. I had only one way to find out, to attend college and see for myself .Nothing like that happened with me or anyone. Instead, whatever seniors we met were never even rude to us .They were quite friendly and were completely opposite of my image of a bully, rowdy senior.

When I moved in to Chennai alone, the first few months were tough. I terribly missed my family and realized how hard my parents work to give me all the comforts .That’s why, I ended up making quite a handful of friends in the first few weeks itself. Then as college began full-fledged, I realized how college is completely different from school. Especially the CGPA and the attendance part .

I won’t go into the details about the CGPA part, but will tell you about the struggle with attendance. The attendance thing is that unlike school attendance is taken on hourly basis i.e. for each class attendance is taken. And like if you want you can miss the class and come back for the next hour .So there goes a lot of your time figuring out which are the classes you can miss.The missed class for no reason at all is known as a bunk.

As time passes by, you then gradually get your squad. The squad has 4–5 friends which are life-lines, without whom your college life will have a big void. Then there are some people who motivate you to study and then there are also those which inspire you to become a better person. And then for every interest of yours, you’ll definitely find a boy / girl with whom you can keep talking on that sub for hours and whenever there’s a new development, you contact that person !

College is basically a combination of :

Fun , Study and Sleep .

It’s basically your choice on how you juggle the three !

By the time, all this is over; you get to face the End Semester exams. These exams are capable of giving sleepless nights to any engineering student, even the best .But again, as this is my life, I did not get to face them like the rest of the world.

All credit goes to Mother Nature; Chennai was hit by a flood just in the second half of the month of November. And boom, even though my exams were postponed, I was still stuck there. Then finally, I came to know that the best way was to somehow reach Bangalore via bus and from there take either a train or a flight to Kolkata .I did that and finally reached my home exhausted. Having never seen a flood before, it completely scared the shit out of me and I was glad I was back home.