Engineer Your Way!!!--- Ms.Rani Pallavi

ENGINEER YOUR WAY!
                                                        -Rani pallavi mohapatra




A lost soul in search of the elusive “truth”…….,
A forsaken child in search of love……………...,
A betrayed person in search of faith beyond bounds……..,
On this journey, am I one out of the above?  To drift like a rudderless paper boat on the uninhibited stream or to sail like a mighty ship boldly towards the bright horizon!
To surge with buoyant hopes, in search of the pot filled with gold coins, at the very sight of the magical rainbow despite the knowledge that the pursuit would be futile; seems to be the call of the hour. To move into the dark tunnel of ‘struggle’ guarded by the jaws of ‘defeat’, without a flicker of  the light of ‘success’ at the other end, seems to be the rule of the era.
Dear friends, welcome to the world of engineering!
Gone are days when the sun used to gently awaken you each  morning with its caressing  warmth but you turned away grumpily to go back to your sweet dreamland.
Gone are the days when your Mom would coax you lovingly to come out of your sinfully comfortable mattress and hurry up for the school.
Gone are the days when you lazed out in the sunny carefree days of the school and still managed to score well in the examinations, just because you had a well-oiled piece of brains on those freaky shoulders of yours!
Lost are the days when you did not have to try your hand at flattering your ‘masters of learning’ for marks, they would give it to you any how, if you did not screw up your exams.
Lost are the days when you did not have to worry that your parents are not the so-called childhood buddies of some high authority in your alma-mater, while your class mate is, so there exists a chance of him being favoured in practical exams.
Lost are the days when cultural fests and itsy-bitsy competitions in your wonderful institute, used to be free and fair, without a mandatory tie up with the organizers.
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Once again dear friends, welcome to the world of engineering………………..
Day 1- scene 1-act 1: lights, camera, action!!!!
“Good morning respected sir and madam!!! I Miss./Mr. So & so is enlightened to be amidst the high and mighty ones like you. Today must have been my lucky day to have been worthy enough of your all pervading & glorifying attention. O’ highness how may I be of any use to you? How may I fulfil your thirst for the humour of the day?”----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Hold on! This isn’t the statement of some lucky earthling who had a chance encounter with some migrating celestial being from heavens, but that of a poor “first year”.
That’s right! In engineering your nomenclature is in terms of years –first, second and so on till fourth (the grand one among all!). Did you dare to squeak your name out? Oh no! No! Don’t you even think of it, if you are but a mere wonky tonky first year!!!
Oh stop complaining about human rights! First years are not entitled to even human rights. Reason???
Ha! Ha! Ha! It seems you are new to into this world.
Don’t you know that first years are not even allowed to ask the reason? No ifs, buts or whys! Do what you are said, that’s the rule. Stop being sissy, if you have started complaining of head reeling and stomach ache, or even worse heart-ache. Oops! I meant chest pain. But now that we have bumped into the elusive matters of heart, lets then have a tête-à-tête on it.
Well! The first declaration on this front is that now this subject will be no more elusive. If you are a guy, well don’t worry my dear boy things will be tough for you. But if you are gifted (you know looks or brains or bank balance or a golden heart, any one will do) then you do hold a chance. If you are a girl, well my dear be prepared for a brain wacking and heart wrenching extravaganza. Behind every aspect of life there is a very logical cause. I beg your pardon dear readers; you see logic sounds better and sanely plausible, instead of irrational emotions. So logically scrutinising the ratio of males to females in a standard engineering college, we come across the miserable gender statistics. Thus, due to serious dearth of adequate members of one biological group in comparison to the other, there exists an unstable equilibrium which tends to set the stage for a many –to-one relation. In simpler terms “many guys after one girl” tale. That’s not all! There is more shock and trauma. Now that the current hype is on having a GF/BF (messed up with abbreviations? hope not), beside you to flaunt around rather than finding your true soul mate. So, all relation-ally honest people better beware of nasty shocks coming your way.
You see these days “love” is but something that rakes in the moolah (hard cash) on V-days! No offence intended to all the true soul mates out there. Sadly, given that this is the norm of the day, possibilities exist that even your genuine emotion might be mistaken by the rout to be but another cheap ‘going around’ stuff. But as the situation demands, you need to believe yourself and hold your head high. Moving back to the logic! Looking at the picture through biological lenses; recent studies have proved that state of “love” is a complex game of emotions and is transitory as well as unstable in nature. Those first flush of charged up emotions and rush of adrenaline on seeing your “crush”, is but a complex game play of hormones. What we term as love, is just our hormones acting weird. Trust me! It’s no fault of any one. Scientists have even established that the state of crush is momentary and it always seeks stability, the kind that comes from a permanent relationship, something which culminates into may be marriage or life-long commitment. But once that “permanent” factor comes into the scene; your temporary “adrenaline rushes” become rare. In a lay man’s words the initial spice of your relationship drains out and you start taking each other for granted. This is where one needs to work in order to make a relation go on, but again due to lack of sense or an over dose of nonsense. Alas! Couples fall apart like a pack of cards. If you are expecting sobs and wet handkerchiefs or a sweet mushy re-union then you are wrong buddy! The irony is no re-union with same co stars occurs, though new pairing does catch your eye. Yes! The same people whom you saw swearing to each other vows are now doing it again but to different people in the same campus. Don’t blame Ekta Kapoor, even she draws her inspiration from here before making a caricature of Hindu marriage act on television.

Seems we had enough of philosophy, shifting over to something else. There are myriad opinions and plethora of ideas, good, bad and otherwise too. If you are a lucky soul to have some “publicly” assumed rocking branch like ‘electronics and telecommunications’ or maybe ‘computer science’, then congratulations you are going to have a smooth ride. Even if you score a five – point something CGPA, people outside the premises of college will certainly look up at you with awe and wonder. In fact the rule applies to all non-core branches. But God forbid, if by any means you land up in a core branch, even if the decision was not enforced upon you but an innate love for the subject made you choose the branch, still buddy you have to keep explaining the rest of your life to all your oh-so-concerned relatives, creepy neighbours, cranky well-wishers that “core” is not all that “bore”. Call it the lack of awareness or the blinding software boom beside which everything else pales, general public have stopped prioritising knowledge and have decided to worship the “information technology” sector. Not that it is something undeserving, but other sectors are equally or maybe more deserving in terms of praises.
Worse would be the plight of your family members who would have to keep pacifying nosy neighbours and acerbic tongued kith and kin for the rest four years, issuing every time a pretty sane statement that “every branch has its own scope and my ward chose ‘so-and-so branch’ with keen interest and pride”. Pathetic, I know! But dear friend, that’s the norm of the (complacently foolish) world. Talk of this aspect within the campus, well there is more salt to rub on the COREans’s wounds. A polite refusal from certain top IT companies to test the worthiness of core branch candidates coupled with incessant belittling from oh-so-lucky peer group are some of the starters coming your way.
If under such adverse circumstances, you happen to be a female student then you have earned ire of every other Tom, Dick and Harry. All those high flown talks of women liberation are now mere dust. Even if you are confident about your potential, still it’s going to be a ride with lots of hiccups, on your way up. If you score high, the ‘male’ species would term it as an unfair use of beauty rather than brains or hard-work. If you don’t score well, it would be a triumph of ‘male’ propaganda that females are not meant for engineering, spare core branches. Bewildering, isn’t it? Yes, it is. And we thought we live in some modern technocratic era of revolutionary thoughts and innovative ideas.
What a techno-savvy caricature!
This is life, which keeps on taking a full swing semester after semester. People come and go. Ideas form and vanish. Triumphs happen and pass off into oblivion. Failures burn and rise like a phoenix from the ashes….. Myriads of colours, bountiful of emotions, fusion of talents, confluence of views and galaxy of opinions keep see-sawing before your eyes. Life teaches you the hard way, but it does teach you forever. In a turbulent swirl of facts, hypotheses and laws, some where exists the sought after peaceful ‘eye of the cyclone’. Where the intangible ‘balance’ of life thrives like the mystical elixir.                         
The journey beckons you traveller, start now!!! 
Without a doubt, the world of engineering certainly rocks ( don’t start hitting your head on ‘rocks’, coz’ this would prove to be the most oft repeated word in the campus ,trust me)! Till next time, keep rockin’ in your ‘rock-garden’ (others call it campus)!