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.