The Pyramids are beautiful, aren't they?

This thought struck me an hour or so after my final presentation May 2. When I started thinking over it, I realized how this applies so beautifully in our context too.

Even after studying Chemical Engineering for the last four years, I daresay I'm fully confident even in a single topic and I am very sure that many of my batch mates would agree with me on this (I hope ;-) ). Mostly, it is about mugging before the exams and really not about learning. To reinforce my claim, most of us are out with a non-technical job.

For an average and sincere student, I think no one enjoys the engineering student life more than an IITian and when I say it, I literally mean it. I have seen people from other engineering colleges fighting real hard with labs, assignments and projects whereas most of us in IIT peacefully manage all these and yet again when I say "manage", most of the times, it is through faulty and dubious means.

I really feel that the real fight is in clearing the JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) and once we are done with it, not much is left to do. I mean it depends on what your aspirations are but the fact remains that you can get away without doing much. The placement results are too evidence to the above claim.

Having said all this, the life still remains busy for those who involve themselves into other activities, whether with a sense of aspiration or ambition. There is a lot of running around and time-management involved in all these activities. Albeit I haven't been a major success on the academic or non-academic front, I sure have done a lot of running around. And I really feel it helps. Because considering the academic scenario of IITB that I've presented above, I question myself if I have learnt anything in the past four years?

The answer is yes because o/w this post wouldn't have come. And to mention the two most important of them, they are 'common sense' and 'how to deal with people'. Not that I didn't had common sense when I came here and that I just 'deal' with people now. The 'common sense' here is used in a broader and holistic sense and it has surely developed over the last four years. When it comes to 'dealing with people', it is essentially about coordinating and developing this ability to work with them rather than the usual meaning of 'taking work out of them'.

Developing these two take time and more so experience and that's why I said that one needs to involve himself/herself into many things which give opportunities to experience. And as I said, a lot of running around is required. There was a very common observation across most of the final year students in the last few days – all of us were just feeling like running away from this place. I see it as the result of tiredness of all this running around and now that there was a window to escape, we were all going restless.

Like Santiago of 'The Alchemist', I felt like asking the old sorcerer about all these efforts and that were they really required. But I knew that the answer I ought to get was the same that Santiago got - "If I had told you, you wouldn't have seen the Pyramids. They're beautiful, aren't they?" The efforts and patience anticipated for these small but highly important learning is a lot and only when they are spent, we get to see Pyramids at times too. And the Pyramids are really beautiful too :-).