Candid confessions in my last hour as a teenager!!!

It is 28th of July and the clock just struck 11 pm... The next one hour is not an hour, neither is it 60 minutes, it is more like 3600 seconds. I count down each of these 3600 seconds one by one as they are the last 3600 seconds of a phase of my life. These few moments are my last few as a teenager as I turn 20 finally...
20!! Twenty!! Wow... i am an adult at last as far as the definition according to English literature is concerned. From thirTEEN to nineTEEN and now finally twenty... I know i just grow older by a day from today to tomorrow but there is something psychologically significant about getting out of your teens. I am not excited because it is my birthday as i dont really believe in celebrating my birthday (what have i achieved for the world to actually celebrate my birthday???... it makes more sense to celebrate 29th july as the great J.R.D.Tata's birthday as he has influenced in the shaping up of the world in his own way... it makes more sense to celebrate 29th july as fernando alonso's birthday as he has been a two time F1 champion to date...it makes more sense to celebrate 29th july as sanjay dutt's birthday as he has entertained loads of people though cinema....but celebrate 29th july as my birthday? ridiculous!!! for now at least)
[3000 secs to go] There is a sense of regret in turning 20 as this is probably the end of the most challenging yet enjoyable phase of one's life. In your early teens, life may seem harsh as it is a transition from the innocence of childhood to the crudeness of the world. You are suddenly handed responsibilities and you are answerable to the world for your failures. You are made to understand that the next few years as a teen are the most important in your life as it basically sets up your life. There is one part of you which wants to carry on with life as normal and be happy with what you get and there is this other part which compels you to take up responsibility and set goals and work to achieve these goals. Now which of these is the angelic part and which is the satanic part is something that cannot be discerned. And this is the most inconvenient period for your hormones to start kicking in. Had man been created such that these hormonal changes take place after the teens, it could have lead to more people attaining their goals. Here you are, as a teenager who has understood the importance of the years immediately ahead of you and set goals for yourself and started working to attain them and other than the obstacles you have to face in the society, the mightiest obstacle you face is yourself- your wavering mind which would be looking for the slightest distraction to weaken your resolve. Some are strong enough just ignore this satanic part of the mind and keep up their assiduousness while some succumb to it and end up choosing a different path which is less likely to lead to being "successful" in life as the society describes it. Thus a person's teen life is a rocket launcher to his future. Of course, you do have the opportunity to steer the rocket, however it took off, but often the initial momentum provided by the launch is probably what sets the rocket to attain the height.
[Hey just 1800 seconds to go... ]Now my teen life, from that point of view has been mixed. Pre-teen, I was very studious and fiercely competitive in school and loved to be on top of my class, then my resolve wavered as I entered the dreaded teens and I became this guy with multiple personality, one part wanting to freak out and the other wanting to continue being this focused studious guy. The final avatar of Ajay in his teens turned out to be a cocktail of both these, who freaked out quite a bit sometimes (during when he was regretting not being more assiduous) and who also was quite assiduous sometimes (during when he was regretting not being more freaked out). Both these traits were like the first law of yin and yang [Yin-yang are Opposing-Yin and yang describe the polar effects of phenomena]. There was this rebellious part of me which didnt want to do what I didnt like doing (and there were a lot of things I didnt like doing academically- like studying history, biology etc [loved reading these but not studying as I felt all this can be looked up in books anytime..so whats the need of memorizing]) and there was this other sincere part which wanted to do what I was supposed to be doing. These subjects made my academic life till my 10th grade pretty dull.
Then during my last years at school, I enjoyed the most in all my 19 [ 20 in another 1200 seconds] years of life. Had an enjoyable life where I used Yin and yang's second law (Yin-yang are Mutually Rooted- the yin and the yang aspect of any one phenomenon will, when put together, form the entire phenomenon) and managed to draw a balance in life. I knew I had good potential and could compete with the best of my peers. But then as time went on, I realised I am probably in the top 10 percent of the people competitively but not the top 3-4 percent, which is where you have to be in a fiercely competitive country like India. The people in the top 4 % attain what they aim for and the people who are below this 10 percent do not expect much out of themselves. It is people like me who are in this "bracket of disappointment", who end up feeling cheated. Thoughts like "had i been luckier", "had i worked harder" do keep coming up, making you feel low. I ended up that way after 12th std when I got a decent enough top 400 AIEEE state rank which would give me entry into many NITs but none in branches I desire, when I did decently enough in the JEE to clear the individual cutoffs for maths and physics but fell short in chemistry (well short actually- so no regrets), when I did decently enough in BITSAT which would give me admission into disciplines in BITS which I did not fancy taking.
[still 300 seconds left- hey dont ask me my age now.... i will answer only after 5 mins... am probably one of the very few who re into 4th yr of coll and still in their teens...thanks to my being underage...feel inferior..Anyways] Much to the disgruntlement of many of my friends and well-wishers, I joined SRM where I got CSE which is what I wanted to take up. I have absolutely no regrets to that decision I took which some people muse over even now. I have spent my last three teen years here and this has really been a transformational period. From the shy introvert in school, to the gregarious extraversive person that I am now, it has indeed been a huge transformation. Now I am more of this rebel, who questions the norm in everything I do and proceed only if it makes sense to me. I have my own set of ideals which I follow. I have really chilled out in the college part of my teen life and really had a good time. Although my college life here has not offered me as much an intellectual education as other colleges might have, it has definitely given me an exposure which I could ve not got in most other places. I feel this place has set me up wonderfully for my transformation into adulthood.
Transformation to adulthood.... now thats not far away...in fact only some 20 seconds away... countdown...13..12..11..10..7..6..4..3..2..1.. tada i am an adult now... happy birthday to me....and wishing myself a happy and prosperous future... hey ask me my age now.....i am 20 ...TWENTY...that sounds exciting...
Well...anyways i am happy at where my life is heading presently and I am getting a good opportunity to give myself another thrust when I go to UC Davis next month (again thanks to SRM). I just hope my entry into adulthood will be a smooth one and I can attain escape velocity using this thrust...
Wow .... it was nice blogging about an event that is happenening in life presently.... I started with the intention of writing a small blogpost summarizing my [now past] teen years to be and ended up deviating completely from that and writing what random thoughts i was gettting in my mind... it is 1216 am now and this is the longest i ve spent writing a blog entry... an hour and quarter almost.... Gotta end it here before more random thoughts start entering my mind.... wishes thru ph calls and msges ve started pouring in and i gtg to attend to them... will be back with hopefully a more sane blogpost next...

The beginning of a new journey!!!

This entry was long due. It is just that I wanted to make sure it was going to definitely happen before I came out in public with this. At 1620 hrs IST on July the 3rd, all uncertainty vanished and now I can blog all I want about it.
This event i was talking about was my interview at the American consulate for my US visa. Now that I succeeded in getting one, I know what is ahead in the immediate future. I had got a chance to study at the highly rated Univerisity of California, Davis for the fall and winter semesters (from Sep '08 to Mar '09), thanks to a MoU signed by UCD with my college. I had applied for that and was accepted by UCD and they sent me my I-20. The only thing that was to then decide my fate was my visa interview and I had a lot at stake too. I had not really prepared for a scenario where I would not be issued a visa. We had already fixed tenants for our house in Chennai as my mother was also going to shift to Bangalore where my dad had taken up a job last year. I was initially going to move into the hostel before this UCD option came up and now I had not even booked a room at the hostel assuming that I would not be here and it is too late to get a hostel room now. So had my visa been rejected, I would ve been on the streets literally. I would probably have moved in with some of my friends who live together but fortunately I dont have to encounter that situation. And it was not such an improbable situation actually looking back at my experience in the consulate. The whole environment was hostile and it was guilty until proven innocent as far as the consulate people interviewing us were concerned. Credit to them, the Americans at the counter were quite fair and thought twice before rejecting someone. That was not the case with an American Indian woman (note that i dont use lady here as i generally would) and an African American woman at other counters, who rejected candidates with no consideration at all. Take the case of a person I met when I was standing in the queue, who was a passout from IIT chennai who was in the top 5 % of his class with a 9+ GPA and having refused a couple of 8 lakhs p.a jobs through placements at IIT because he had secured admission for MS/Ph.D at the highly reputed Georgia tech with FULL graduate assistantship. Imagine the audacity of this American Indian woman to just reject his application after 30 seconds consideration on grounds of lack financial backing. To think he had a full scholarship and did not have to even spend any money from his pocket for his education. And he had so much at stake and was hard done by just due to the arrogance of a particular woman. Its such a pity that so many Indians [including me] have to queue up outside the hostile US embassy to just get a short term visa while they can just walk into our country at their will. We even welcome them with red carpets. Would not there be such a situation ever in my lifetime where American people would queue up outside the Indian consulate in the US to be granted entry in India. I guess thats all wishful thinking. I understand I am being hypocritical as I was one of the people who queued up just a couple of days ago but I sincerely wow that I will do whatever I can to turn India into a place people from US would want to visit.
The future which was hazy, just a couple of days ago, suddenly seems bright and clear. Now [unless i have an accident while crossing the road and my face gets deformed and I require a plastic surgery and the surgeons conjure me a face which resembles that of Osama bin laden and the flight authorities detain me from entering the US mistaking me to be Osama or maybe while I am typing this blog entry I turn into ashes due to Spontaneous human combustion...nah forget it..i can think of a thousand other more plausible reasons] I know that I am taking the September 7th Cathy pacific flight at 0245 IST and going to touch down at San Fransisco at 1315 PDT. [i fly for 18 hours and still end up spending less that 11 hours travelling...wow...i love time zones....but hey as I will be flying through the pacific at one time I will be GMT+9 hrs when I fly over Japan and in if I take a short nap and wake up, I will be GMT-8 hrs....that means I jump 17 hours in a few mins!!! hey this is too complex....i just wont wear my wristwatch during the flight and get confused thinking about the time...]. And once I land at SFO, I know that I will be taking a connecting flight to Sacramento from where Davis is only a few miles away. I know that I am going to move into the apartment arranged for us by UCD with my friends. I know that I am going to fall for a blonde there. Ok academically, I know that I am going to take up courses of my interest in UCD and get good grades, conjure up a good rapport with the professors there and do some good projects there so that I would stand a great chance of getting into either UCD itself or hopefully an even better college for my MS, which is what is my aspiration. I really hope that, one year from now, I can look back at the previous sentence and rejoice about how right I was rather than cringe at the sight of it.
I guess I owe a lot to my college [especially the men who have made it possible, Prof. Gopal, Kiruba Sir, Mr. Sathyanarayan and all the others involved... wow...i never thought i would hear myself say this] for providing me this wonderful and unique opportunity, often unheard of in most colleges in India, and I just hope I can make full use of it to do something worthwhile. As, I would be spending effectively the whole of the next two semesters here, I will not be attending many more classes at SRM. It does feel a little sad to think I wont ever be attending classes with the amazing friends with whom I ve shared my life for the past three years. It does feel sad that I wont ever be attending the classes of some of the professors here whom I have known well. Correlating both, i am sadder that I wont be able to sit together with my friends and criticize and laugh at some profs whose classes (more accurately reworded as gags) have been a constant source of entertainment. I am even sadder that I wont ever get an opportunity to bunk classes at SRM. But then if I aim to move on to something bigger, I guess these sacrifices are a part of the bargain. Let me wish myself all the best for the future..