Personal

Last year, one day when I was back home from IISc during some holidays, Upappa slid a newspaper clipping up to me while we were sitting in his room. It was an illustration of a fountain pen, the sort that appeared on student’s corner pages in malayalam dailies. Something about the way the neatly torn paper was folded and extracted from his everything-diary that was always at the foot of his bed was so endearing. He wanted me to get a pen like that for him. I joked about why he’d want one now, and he told me he wanted it for all the stories he had yet to write. ...

I took my scooty out yesterday for the first time since the year began, after letting her slowly gather dust for a month. The last time I drove was just before we headed to Mussoorie at the end of December. When we left for the bus terminal, I could feel the heavy fog settling in, appearing thicker than usual. In the darkness and fog, it was difficult to see the murky brownness of the pollution that was a defining characteristic of the Delhi sky. The fog wrapped around everything, floating very dramatically against the yellow glow from the windows of the moving metro trains. It felt like we were already in a hill station. ...

Once I got comfortable with the courses and the campus, I expected life at IISc to be calm and wholly academic – and it was that, but also so much more. As I write to you now from a wholly different city, I wonder how so much could have happened in the span of 18 months, and how you can change this much as a person while being the same in many ways that count. ...

Not a lot of people know this, but when I decided to write GATE, I did it with mostly just IISc in mind. However, I tried to keep my expectations very realistic (read: low), to the extent that I didn’t even look up pictures of the campus until results came out, wanting to not have an image to go along with my disappointment if things were to go south. I spent five months telling myself to be ready to embrace the plan Bs and Cs instead, while doing whatever I could to ensure I wouldn’t have to resort to them. ...

Checking my phone late in the evening last week, I noticed that our final semester results had been published. The notification didn’t bring the usual nervousness that typically accompanies result-checking; this time, I had a fairly good idea of what to expect. To begin with, our last exams were bizarre in and of itself. Would any sane person have imagined writing their engineering papers completely within the comfort of home, with the only expectation that the answers be sent back neatly scanned in a span of 2 hours and 45 minutes? That they would be asked to write a 100 marks paper, which would only need a score out of 70 that could then be scaled back up to 100, and with no other strings attached? Even with forecasts of normalization based on past SGPA’s, to say that our batch had a blast would be an understatement. (A pandemic would do that for you). ...

As someone who had been living pretty much on the internet since I got my first laptop in 8th grade, Linkedin wasn’t new to me. But back then, it was the “adults’ website” (no, not that kind) - a place where people with jobs went to meet other people with jobs and talked about their very adult lives - opportunities, openings, networking and the rest. It wasn’t until the first week of college, when professionals coordinating our orientation program mentioned how it was the most important place for students looking to get jobs that I actually went and created an account of my own. ...

A month ago, we organized Hack the Night — a 24-hour hackathon, exclusively for women. This is the story of all that went on behind the scenes. I got to know about Arya, SKG and Rethink around December 2017. Arya was leading the Opportunity Project at Rethink at the time. When I learnt that a Women-in-Tech initiative was being launched for female engineering students, I immediately applied for the same. The four weeks program culminated in 5 participants receiving GHCI scholarships — and that was how I met Sijo and Arya finally in person at Bangalore. ...