Dawn to Dusk - Part V. The Nightfall

It was the summer of 2011, probably July. Season of Entrance exams and admissions. Everyone was busy with these things, especially the parents, more than the students.

Everywhere you go, you'd find admission forms, college prospects and never ending list of entrance tests and their acronyms. Next time you come across one, if you notice, you'd find that private colleges always have a good looking girl on their ad, and some high reputed colleges would even go further and put on a good looking boy along with the girl, all of course, in a scenic background and good amount of PhotoShop enhancements. Wonder if they want to show off their campus or they imply you could find a similar girl there?

Coming back to the story, I was no exception, had decided not to go abroad and waste money and neither did my parents want to send me away. NIT Agartala and the state quota seemed the only viable option (though I'm strictly against any kind of quota stuff).

Everyone had pretty big expectations from me, due to good results during class 10 (just for bragging, I was 6th in NERIST NEC list, and 10th in NE in some random NLTSE exam conducted by some Vikas Institute :p ). And expectations, as always, brought bad luck to me.

Studying in NIT was always a kinda dream, everyone talked about it, it was where everyone wanted to be, something of national level, something like "bigger than yourself" stuff. Something which was not destined to be mine. I always had to travel the lonely road away from the crowd, and this time was no exception.

On the day of result, I found that I had missed the so called "state quota" by the marks equivalent of one question. Mom was asking me about the result, and I did not know what to tell. Cause I had not yet been into such situation where I told mom "No mom, I failed in that exam". Never before had I cried for something related to studies. It was one of the few things I was good at.
God knows what happened that it had to let me down, for the first time, when I needed it the most.

And yes, bad result is the least of your problems when your friends, who never got more marks than you in 12 years of school, get admitted into YOUR dream NIT. How? Well, that's another story.

I ended up getting admitted to Tripura Institute of Technology ,T.I.T instead of N.I.T, (well, FYI, it's more than just a difference of alphabets, but again, that's another story). Good thing was that my parents were liberal enough to let me take my subjects on my own wish, i.e. Computer Science, amongst all the negative comments by "well-wishers".

Though I started remaining a bit depressed and became kinda anti social from then on.

I hate sad endings, so just to finish on a good note, circumstances improved soon, which is again, "another story", actually the next part of the story, when this blog itself was born.

Following the "good" path, is it really worth it?

There are two types of students in these world, those whose aim of life is 'pre-exam suggestions' and those who sweat out their days trying to finish the whole syllabus manually.

Theoretically, the 2nd type is considered the 'good' ones and they are assured by the common dialogue "you'll gain the true knowledge, while those who read suggestions will only pass, but never do great things in life".
Sound assuring, but does practical life agree?

No, not necessarily... on the last day of academic session, no one will remember who studied xerox notes and who read the books. All that'd be visible would the better marks, not how they got it.
Yes, I sound hypocrite, but I've seen, seeing and will see such instances come true over and over again.

On the day of entrance exams, no one gives a damn if you are a good guy or genius student, all you gotta do is score the marks, no matter if you manage it from peeking over your shoulders, or tick some MCQ riding on your luck. Or you could just be a good guy, do the sums yourself and miss the answer by a whisker (yes, entrance exams' MCQ answers are set like that, all 4 answers will be so much alike that someone will get the wrong ans by a silly mistake in last step, while someone will reach the right answer by doing the whole process wrong)

I don't mean everyone cheats, but yes, the option is as much viable as studying hard.

There was a time when the proverbs were formulated, people were simple and innocent and the world was much simpler a place to live in...and there's this present world, which is a quite different scenario. It's pretty hard to decide if those proverbs still hold good, they need to be modified, or discarded altogether.

Maybe today the "Survival of the fittest" is a more important concept, and we need to adapt to the changes. But do we really have to stop following the good path to be fittest? Or is our definition of "good" and "bad" is flawed itself?

Given that Darwin's theory can't be disproven, I will just stick to my concept of "good" and carry on hoping to discover something new in the concept of "fittest"