Monday, March 06, 2006

I-Robot

Love is all about watching movies that you don’t like”, This quote has nothing to do with my post.

I-Robot-A good movie. I have a taste for action movies, so I liked it very much. But this post is not a critical review of the movie. This post is about me and how I have felt all through my 23 years of lonely existence on this lonely planet. Don’t think I am an exobiologist who is feeling really depressed about not being able to find life in his recent research.

This song of Linkin Park, How true it is for many of us.

i'm tired of being what you want me to be
feeling so faithless
lost under the surface
i don't know what you're expecting of me
put under the pressure
of walking in your shoes
[caught in the undertow / just caught in the undertow]
every step that i take is another mistake to you
 
i've
become so numb
i can't feel you there
become so tired
so much more aware
i'm becoming this
all i want to do
is be more like me
and be less like you
 
can't you see that you're smothering me
holding too tightly
afraid to lose control
cause everything that you thought i would be
has fallen apart right in front of you
 
[caught in the undertow / just caught in the undertow]
every step that i take is another mistake to you
[caught in the undertow / just caught in the undertow]
and every second i waste is more than i can take
 
but i know
i may end up failing too
but i know
you were just like me
with someone disappointed in you

I have had lots of grudges with the kind of life, I have lived. The reason is similar to what the lyrics of songs are, but not exactly the same. I haven’t been forced by my family or any one to do what I have been doing, or that is the way things have been. My dad is a rational being, and that is the nature that nature has been inherited and amplified in my genes.

It seems like I have been systematically brainwashed to become an iitian I don’t remember watching planes like many other small kids and thinking about a becoming fighter jet pilot. Also I don’t remember dreaming to become a doctor or engineer or a military officer or anyone.

Why?

What is the difference between me and others?

I still don’t know the answer. But I can make an attempt to dig deep in the dark. My father like me is a mediocre kind of a person and he realized pretty early that we were no better than him. Results of this conclusion are the debate that I still can’t win or loose.

I still remember being forced to study in the summer vacations as early as class 5th. I hated that and who won’t? The tradition is same for me and my brother. My brother started preparing for JEE from the class 9th itself.

Do you feel happy if you achieve whatever you have been striving for? I believe that most of us do. I found out that I am rare exception on the day my JEE results were out. I shocked, and I still find it difficult to digest that I wasn’t jubilant. It appeared as if my dad got thru rather than me. It was just another day. I can get philosophical and say that “Milestones are a very small part of journey”. They typical analogy that comes to my mind is “If you walk 1 km and reach the mark, what is longer and more important…the mark or the kilometer you travelled”. But if I dig deep into myself, I find myself unable of being happy because I don’t know the definition of being happy. How does one become happy or sad?

I found out after coming to IIT that people should have hobbies, which allow them to relax and enjoy. I didn’t have a hobby. But the best part is that I forced myself to develop a hobby not because a hobby makes a person mentally fit but because in the IIM interviews it’s very difficult to get thru if you don’t know a to z about your hobby. This is what my seniors told me. The way my seniors talked, I found the interview unimaginable without a hobby. “You can’t be a sane if you don’t have a hobby”.

I liked cricket and tennis to some extent but it was difficult to know everything, literally everything about the past present and future of the games. So these games were out of question. Finally after a lot of research I forced myself to develop a hobby of reading biographies.

The point is not the hobby. The point is, it was never enjoyment, or sense of fulfillment. It was always my goal, target. Sadly I didn’t make it.

But what kind of life have I been living in order to achieve that. What is the difference between a robot and me? A robot does whatever task is given and I have always done the same and so has my brother and so have many of us.

I have been made into a robot stamped “B.Tech chemical engineering IIT Bombay”. But I believe that being a person who feels like a chemical engineer would be much more different than the way I am.

But can I feel? I don’t know….

ak

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home