I almost Quit School

I still remember interviewing for full time position at Cafe Coffee Day in the fall of my first year at Intercollege. There are some events that uproots your persona, forces you to scrutinise your faith in everything, smashes each and every branch of trust you have in yourself. You are at your lowest where you are simply non-existent to yourself and you tend to believe that the world is shattering on you. At first the standard psychological defence mechanism of ‘Denial’ comes to rescue, but over the period it moulds you in a way thats too drastic. Sometimes positively, other times in a reverse. Now you are the same mortal but with a different set of ideals, beliefs and a new philosophical framework.

After finishing High School from a small town in Bihar, I applied for Intercollege education at one of the most renowned and prestigious educational institution of India. Surprisingly they accepted my application and of course through an entrance exam. Something which I brood over till date, Whether I was truly blessed or an unfortunate one? The ancient philosophy of Amor Fati, which simply teaches us to love our fate, embrace and show gratitude for our past and future episodes, prescribes us to eagerly accept and always try to make most out of what life throws. By the end of the first year at my two years of Intercollege it was clear that I was terrible at my studies there, even though I was admitted through an entrance exam which contradicts the former. Even after paying hefty sums at tuition classes, my grades were not improving. Then came the result day and I failed in physics, took the Re-examination and again a hideous fail.

Muslims have the ordered structure of Zakat , Sadaqah and Waqf, Where every able Muslim is obliged to donate a certain proportion of wealth(almost 5%) each year to charitable causes. Huge sums of this money is spent on education and I was the beneficiary and till now some of my educational expenses are being covered by these funds. Failure in standard 11th turned my world upside down, I was in constant fear of losing my philanthropist’s faith in me, shame of being in the same class while my friends were being promoted. The fact that I have to face the same teaching staffs for another year. Then my middle class family on whom whole of my life depends, from memories to dreams to expiration — whose opinions are a world to me. It was all for the first time — A conjunction of distressful episodes. My morale was shattered to infinitely, my personality went vacuum, rationality turned dark. Even though every second was ticking against me, I had this abstract notion of Amor Fati. My family refused to pay my expenses just to inflict more hardship, which truly was a weighted decision on their part and it eventually forced me to contact one of my acquaintance and ask him to set-up an interview at Cafe Coffee Day.

Back in junior days, We had this norm where subject teachers would spoon feed . They’ll serve you with all the information you need to pass the test, help you guess the most probable questions that would likely occur in the question set But here, everything was different, I was walking around with training wheels detached, I was own my own — an introvert — too intimidated to ask for help, too reserved and apprehensive to talk about my failing papers. While everyone were preparing for something bigger like IITs, NITs…, I was in a constant struggle to deal with basic concepts like vectors, projectile motions… Partially because of the environment where everyone were on their paths to discover ‘The Theory of Everything’ buried somewhere in the coaching materials from yet another IIT -JEE Institution. It was problematic, especially for me, because I tend to think of knowledge as a Cognitive Schema — a sort of a mental map. A low level abstract cerebral framework to reason your ideas with. But here students were mugging different permutations and combinations of same formulae. So definitely there was too much of spoon-feeding and so much so that you won’t even get time to question the Status Quo. Moreover, the physics instructor at school had this unique style of teaching nothing and even if he somehow feels like teaching then it will last only 10 minutes by the end of bell. So I stopped interacting with teachers and started reading the only thing I was fascinated with as well as good at, it was ‘Computers’.

In short I RAN AWAY.

In The psychology of Interpersonal Relations, Fritz Heider presented Attribution Theory. A theory about how people interpret behaviour, how one make causal attribution/explanation for their behaviour as well as others. I personally find this theory exciting because your behaviour and your view on it often determines what you will do about it. Back in time, I was fully attributing my failing papers to my instructor and of course it was one of the reasons but I was ignoring the fact that it was me who was running away. I always loved computers but why was I even trying to remember every permutations and combinations of the same formulae. Should I pursue an IIT goal over my passion of computers which is making me sick every day? Can I go on all nighter for an JEE entrance question? But yeah I can go all nighter for understanding a computing related problem. I had to define my fears “what if I can’t get into an IIT”. As Tim Ferris put in his TED TALK, The Idea of Fear Setting, it was liberating for me. Now there’s no fear of failure, no need to follow some coach’s path who in reality have zero idea of your potential. I became responsible as every action from now on will have a circular attribution which will eventually point to me. Which leads me to the current day — my second year at undergraduate in computer science , where I am not just following the curriculum but exploring and scrutinising different fields, ideas and philosophies.

We suffer not from the events in our lives, But from our judgements about them. ~EPICTETUS

P.S : I wrote this article because a junior of mine is going through the same phase and I am trying to help him out.

???? ?? In meantime Take Care ??? ?? ??

Special Thanks to Aditi and Shadab Bhai ??