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I recently visited IIT Kharagpur as part of recruitment team on behalf of my company. It was my first visit to any campus since I passed out from college. The campus resembled a lot with my college campus. Almost everything was same. It had a separate area for academics, hostels and sports facilities. There were individual building for every Engineering department. All hostels were along a road. Sports facilities were in between hostel buildings. Same kind of badminton wooden courts were there, as they were in my campus, when I was very fond of this game. They were owned by coach of that game and the coach used to take complete charge of them at the time of Inter-IIT practices. It had one medical facility and one shopping market inside campus itself. That campus had its own restaurant and that restaurant could not be considered among the decent ones at all. Students used to go out in city for good meals. But even the best restaurant of their city could not match the restaurants of Delhi. It had one auditorium which was used for showing movies, same as it was in my campus. No commercial vehicles were allowed inside academic area. Most of the students were on cycles.

Almost everything was similar as of my campus. It had been five and a half years completing my engineering course. It was giving me very nostalgic feeling and a lot to analyze about my old days. I remember, when first time I came to Gurgaon, that city did not seem adaptable to me at all. I thought, I will never be able to ingrain myself with this life. And now, in last five and half years, I am so much ingrained in lifestyle of Delhi that I had totally forgotten those ways of life. Every morning, I wake up on time and dress up in nice clothes for office. Getting dressed up in decent clothes was rarely a concern in college days. The idea of looking smart had never existed in mind at that time. There was the culture and environment of learning, and creating something new. There were sufficient time and opportunities as well. Motivation level was also very high. It was the thing in air of that vicinity. But, I still think, that so much of my efforts went unproductive at that time. Today, I don't do anything, until unless, I am interested in it or it is necessary for my living. I can quite clearly see the returns that I will be making out of my efforts. Even, when I am not certain of positive returns, I am sure that even failures will add a lot to my experiences and next time when I will try something, I will be having more matured and experienced approach. But this was never the case in college. I guess, at some level, I was always uncertain that where I fit.

I used to feel that I had to earn good grades and for this it seemed necessary to attend all the classes. So, I tried to attend all the classes. I always used to pick a seat near window. And, during lectures, I would be looking out of that window. I did not use to do it intentionally. Lectures were so uninteresting that watching out of window was quite pleasing. It is actually tough to be interested in thousands of theories without having interesting enough applications based on those theories. I could, of course, force myself to go to classes, but, that way, I could not generate my interest in those courses. Everyone used to blame curriculum and professors, for not giving them enough examples of applications or teaching subjects in boring way. I think, it would be very wrong to accuse faculties or management for not working on finding interesting applications. If, I put myself in my professors' shoes now, then it seems extremely expensive to arrange applications for some of the engineering streams. A large part of engineering deals with heavy and very expensive machines, which can not be arranged at academic level. And even, if institute could manage to get that kind of money then those machines could not be easily accessible to every single student individually. So, I also find myself in the same situation that how to make those courses interesting to students.

A lot of efforts that I was putting in by forcing myself did not prove very fruitful. When someone coming out of college that inexperienced and non-passionate then obviously the guy would be trying out in many directions to figure out where he could fit in. That was the reason that it still took me almost an year and half  after college to settle in a field, where I can find myself interested. I would say, I am still very lucky. I still can see many of my friends carrying something which they are not at all passionate about and it is pity that some of them will carry it for rest of their life.

Life goes in one direction. Past time never comes back. People loose a lot in their lives not living passionately. Today, I can see that every passing year makes lots of changes in my life. Every next year, I find myself more involved than last year. Now, time is less and responsibilities are more. To do anything new, I have to steal time everyday from my regular life. Now, I have so clear visibility about vastness of life and importance of time. I try to make my life very disciplined, schedule many tasks everyday to get maximum productivity out of it. In those old days, when there was ample of time, no responsibilities at all and all the avenues to bring out our best, then I were investing myself in all the directions, living under false illusions. It had been fair if I had not put any efforts and there had been no returns. But, there was a lot of efforts and all for the sake to just come up with self realization - "I don't fit here". This return seems quite poor for the rigorous 5-6 years of efforts. I feel pity that so much of efforts went unproductive, which could actually had added a lot to my present life.