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As much as I believe in hard work and its outcomes, I feel destiny would always make things right for one, not necessarily the ones we want, but right. Even today when I get a junior texting for advice, dilemma over intern/placement season, or ...

I’d felt this memoir would be a collection of regrets and nothing more, an overwhelming majority of ramblings and hindsight and things I could do better. But actually, writing this and looking back, I realise it was much more than that. The reg...

Take it with a smile, live it with heart and return it back multifolds. We are leaving behind the heritage for you, cherish it with all you have and I assure you that it will never fail you.

One Last Ride

JUL 25, 2023

You arrive with dreams or fabricate a lot of them while being here, a so-and-so version of yourself once you go out of this place, romanticize the whole four years, but in reality, quite a few of those dreams get completed, and added to that, a...

What IIT Roorkee had given me was resuscitation, a new whiff of life from my normal day at office. Something that I had long lost in the past. This was the place where I had run like a cat loose of its tether, this is the place where I had swam...

To fit these four years into a memoir, I am not sure. There is so much to tell – The people, the experiences, and the emotions. While I am still realizing that it is over and gone, here are certain highlights from my time at IITR. No matter wha...

Below is an excerpt from my upcoming revolutionary novel Why Do Anything When You Can Just Read About Other People Who Did Things? - The Art and Science of living through other people. Some books win awards, some win hearts, and others… only se...

See you again

JUL 4, 2023

I planned my last days in a google sheet to make sure that I meet all the close friends whom I met in college and more importantly to click pictures with them, because I don’t know when will we be together again

We are strangers to the future, and if not hopeful we can at least be curious about it (Like I said, I’ve been peppering this line everywhere ever since I read it. This might be r/iamsixteenandthisisdeep material but I like it nonetheless).

I have much to say, a lot to write, but I’ve been perplexed and emotionally overwhelmed. Writing a sign-off post has been a long due over the catalogue.

Bye Roorkee

JUN 25, 2022

I find the act of writing a memoir for a magazine that I once edited slightly weird and self-aggrandizing but meh, since this doesn’t have a rainbow or a Dean’s face on the cover I doubt anyone is getting worked up.

How can I forget that day, when I first stepped in R-land. With no idea of staying here, I just came for registration. After the registration, I was not allowed to go back home. I landed up at this unfamiliar place without saying goodbye to any...

As I had my last journey from Govind Bhawan to the Main Gate, the memories started flashing. When I’d look back, I’d rather not say, “IIT Roorkee you were a dream,” because I enjoyed living each and every moment of it.

An Ode to You

JUN 20, 2022

I was a person guided by one mantra- life becomes simple if you are at the top of something. Everything was laid out easy for me as long as I followed the books. It wasn’t easy when I left my very posh metropolitan home for an IIT I never expec...

This memoir comes after days and days of procrastination. Days of trying to make it a fancy, great-to-read memoir that would at least come close to doing justice to my time here.

You may be expecting lines like “I fell in love with this beauty the moment I saw” or “I smiled at the buildings and said to its walls that you were my dream and it’s time to live this dream”. No, these were not running in my mind.

Until I Found You

JUN 14, 2022

It’s 1 am at night, it’s raining slightly outside and I am listening to Until I found you by Stephen Sanchez. The petrichor makes me reminiscent of the Roorkee rains, and the clear blue skies, the kind you don’t witness much growing up in Delhi...

Stepping into the gates of IIT Roorkee to explore the plethora of opportunities in this “Divine” land, a beautiful chapter of my new life began on July 19, 2018.

Since I first saw a memoir published by Watch Out! I don’t think I ever doubted my plan to write one once I’d graduate. But now that I have graduated, I really don’t know what to write.

Alright, let’s get to it. Let’s talk about this place.

Is this it? That’s the first question I ask myself when I think about Roorkee now. I know the answer to it, and so does everyone around me. But I don’t think I am ready to hear it just yet.

A memoir about our time at Roorkee? Now that I have started to pen down my thoughts, it’s surreal how I could write a book on campus or suffice it in a sentence of sorts, but writing this memoir got me scrolling through a never-ending gallery o...

Roorkee? Where exactly is that again?” was probably the first thing that came to my mind when I heard of you. This, and “Wahan non-veg toh milega na?” In my defense, what else do you expect from an eighteen-year-old with next...

The four years have come and gone in the blink of an eye. Here I am, writing this memoir as a graduating senior with the hope that when I am eighty years old sitting in my rocking chair and I’ll be re-reading this and my family will say to me, ...

This is the last piece I will write for Watch Out!, I figured in for a penny, in for a pound. Proceed at your own peril

As I set about the task of writing this memoir, I find myself plagued by the melancholy realization that nothing I ever write will do justice to my time at Roorkee

I have realised that each one of us lives in an equally kaleidoscopic world, the protagonists of our own stories.

So, it began on a Monday morning @ 10:00 am, when I finally got a chance to enter my dream world in real life.

The more my memories take me back, the more I feel like this has to be a letter. This is a letter to my college days,

MY MEMOIR

AUG 7, 2021

I am very glad that my college degree stipulated that I graduate in four years. However, if someone had told me when I was in my second year that I had an option to graduate then,

A Memoir of Sorts

AUG 19, 2020

Four years ago, around this time, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do in life. I wish I could still say the same thing.

This is an account of how I felt during college years, rather than what exactly I did in college.

It was March of 2018. We had butterflies in our stomach and adrenaline continuously rushing through our blood.

I’m sad today as this journey is ending. Although, you are the stepping stone of my life and I don’t want to leave you now but, there was a part of me that never wanted to come to you in the first place. I feel warm in your arms now.

You’ve left that room, that place, that safe haven. Do you feel anything? Do you feel different? Are you really oblivious to the fact that you will never be at that place where you spent 1500 days of your life?

A Memoir

JUL 11, 2019

Closure is a made up thing invented by Steven Speilberg to sell movie tickets.

Let me begin by saying - Thank you IITR, for giving me the best four years of my life. From first year to now, Roorkee has shaped my personality in unimaginable ways - and I doubt I would have got the same exposure anywhere else.

Writing this memoir takes me back to the first day at R-land standing in a long queue waiting for my turn to officially start living my dream.

Dear Roorkee, I never really wanted you to be a part of my life. Four years ago, I remember feeling like I had no other option except you - like I had to settle for you.

We left home for Roorkee at around 4:30 AM on 23rd July 2015 as I secretly made an entry in my diary, ‘Time to live the dream’.

I loved painting with my fingers as a 7 year old, playing guitar till I bruised my fingers as a 12 year old, and deveining prawns with my granny for her curry as a 15 year old.

I have never been much for vocal expression of my emotions, but I guess that is one of a million things that Roorkee changed about me.

Humans are today the most dominant species on the planet and it wasn’t always the case. It is because we developed a unique evolutionary advantage: our ability to socialize and communicate complex ideas using a language.

I remember my first morning at IIT Roorkee as I woke up to witness a procession of dogs marching into the room since the door had been accidentally left open and apparently, the dogs saw that as an invitation to my humble RJB abode.