Ashoka University : The week that was
"Kehte hain agar kisi cheez ko dil se chaho ... to puri kainaat usse tumse milane ki koshish mein lag jaati hai"
-----Shah Rukh Khan (Om Shanti Om)
(When you want something from the bottom of your heart, the whole world conspires to get it for you)
... And maybe that's why I landed up at Ashoka University for the past one week as a part of Young Scholars Programme.
My first reaction to how the week was, is usually - "Time spent here taught me much more about life and myself that the twelve years at school failed to do so" and also how shortsighted I still am when I take things at their face value and not for what they can be.
When I first stepped on the soils of Ashoka University at Sonepat, all I could feel was a great rush of adrenaline on everyone's faces. There were parents dropping their children off, instructing them to behave and not mess around and being fussed over. Then there were people, the undergrads who were getting us all registered and settled. This was kind of exciting since it made me see myself exactly at the same place, with the same registration thing going on in about a year.
This is where my one week long journey really began.
Following that day, we had a really tight schedule packed with sessions and workshops ranging from psychology to computer science to art appreciation and to leadership talks. We even had numerous workshops on writing and speaking. That is where I received my first lesson. I am generally a very introvert kind of person who would prefer to shy away and not speak in class or a group of people but in one of the workshops on speaking and presentation skills, I could speak confidently for continuously 2-3 minutes.
Our day started at seven in the morning and did not come to an end before eleven in the night. We had classes one after the other in continuation and had to go for sports in the evening which for compulsory for all. The funny thing was that even though I hated my schedule and initially was scared of the fact that I'll have to compromise on my sleep, I went against my own notions. As rightly put up by one of the undergrads - "They will make you work like horses but somehow you will love doing the work and attending the classes because that is just how it is here at Ashoka." And I kid you not the kind of sleep I had, the kind of peace I felt after putting all my efforts into the day, is something I can't describe in words. That feeling was just beyond imagination.
That brings me to the atmosphere that surrounded the campus. It was a very rare thing to see how the students there had so much respect and love, not only for each other but also for the institution itself. It's a very different thing to respect the institution you are in and the people that are part of the institution. It's something of an unusual phenomenon when you have respect for both the institution and its members but both at very individualistic levels. Someone is not hitting you with a hunter to be nice to the organization and it is from heart and is genuine. This is what the students there expressed. They were in awe of Ashoka and its professors at very different levels in the same way a first grader will hold his teacher in high esteems.
We as teenagers have a very limited imagination when it comes to thinking about sex, our sexuality and our individuality. We generally do not go beyond non veg jokes and in most cases certainly not above urbandictionary.com. But what if I told you all of this has a horizon which we can never reach with our limited sense of insight? Because my limited days at Ashoka made me question all of these topics. And I never thought in my wildest dreams that there is a meaning to all of this, a more mature meaning which we can never anticipate. It all started with our cohort seniors introducing us two poems - Dubious by Vikram Seth and Metamorphoses by Ovid. If you read these poems and dwell upon them, you will know what I am talking about.
When we say we are in love we would generally mean it to be a deep sense of attraction with the opposite sex. But what if the same feeling is shared by everyone for everyone? At Ashoka the students displayed just that. They were full of love, as if it is a relationship and with that love they had intimacy. It was as if none could live without the other. As again put up by one of the students there - "We are one family here. There are no seniors and there are no juniors. We all love each other and can not think of this campus without thinking of each other. We have a couple relationship and the couple is formed by the students and the university."
And finally, Ashoka University kept the promise it had made in its prospectus. My roommate was from Haryana, my dining mates were from Maharashtra and Punjab maybe, my music mates were from Madhya Pradesh, our music guide was from West Bengal and some of my friends were even from Ethiopia. All this diversity gave me a very important life lesson. I learned to rise above my own personal differences and prejudices. I learned to look at people from a different perspective and realized that heck, humans are nice beings after all. Not everyone is a school level bully or mean. In the process I learned what is respect and how I can respect people who are not from the same walks of life as me.
-----Shah Rukh Khan (Om Shanti Om)
(When you want something from the bottom of your heart, the whole world conspires to get it for you)
... And maybe that's why I landed up at Ashoka University for the past one week as a part of Young Scholars Programme.
My first reaction to how the week was, is usually - "Time spent here taught me much more about life and myself that the twelve years at school failed to do so" and also how shortsighted I still am when I take things at their face value and not for what they can be.
When I first stepped on the soils of Ashoka University at Sonepat, all I could feel was a great rush of adrenaline on everyone's faces. There were parents dropping their children off, instructing them to behave and not mess around and being fussed over. Then there were people, the undergrads who were getting us all registered and settled. This was kind of exciting since it made me see myself exactly at the same place, with the same registration thing going on in about a year.
This is where my one week long journey really began.
Following that day, we had a really tight schedule packed with sessions and workshops ranging from psychology to computer science to art appreciation and to leadership talks. We even had numerous workshops on writing and speaking. That is where I received my first lesson. I am generally a very introvert kind of person who would prefer to shy away and not speak in class or a group of people but in one of the workshops on speaking and presentation skills, I could speak confidently for continuously 2-3 minutes.
Our day started at seven in the morning and did not come to an end before eleven in the night. We had classes one after the other in continuation and had to go for sports in the evening which for compulsory for all. The funny thing was that even though I hated my schedule and initially was scared of the fact that I'll have to compromise on my sleep, I went against my own notions. As rightly put up by one of the undergrads - "They will make you work like horses but somehow you will love doing the work and attending the classes because that is just how it is here at Ashoka." And I kid you not the kind of sleep I had, the kind of peace I felt after putting all my efforts into the day, is something I can't describe in words. That feeling was just beyond imagination.
That brings me to the atmosphere that surrounded the campus. It was a very rare thing to see how the students there had so much respect and love, not only for each other but also for the institution itself. It's a very different thing to respect the institution you are in and the people that are part of the institution. It's something of an unusual phenomenon when you have respect for both the institution and its members but both at very individualistic levels. Someone is not hitting you with a hunter to be nice to the organization and it is from heart and is genuine. This is what the students there expressed. They were in awe of Ashoka and its professors at very different levels in the same way a first grader will hold his teacher in high esteems.
We as teenagers have a very limited imagination when it comes to thinking about sex, our sexuality and our individuality. We generally do not go beyond non veg jokes and in most cases certainly not above urbandictionary.com. But what if I told you all of this has a horizon which we can never reach with our limited sense of insight? Because my limited days at Ashoka made me question all of these topics. And I never thought in my wildest dreams that there is a meaning to all of this, a more mature meaning which we can never anticipate. It all started with our cohort seniors introducing us two poems - Dubious by Vikram Seth and Metamorphoses by Ovid. If you read these poems and dwell upon them, you will know what I am talking about.
When we say we are in love we would generally mean it to be a deep sense of attraction with the opposite sex. But what if the same feeling is shared by everyone for everyone? At Ashoka the students displayed just that. They were full of love, as if it is a relationship and with that love they had intimacy. It was as if none could live without the other. As again put up by one of the students there - "We are one family here. There are no seniors and there are no juniors. We all love each other and can not think of this campus without thinking of each other. We have a couple relationship and the couple is formed by the students and the university."
And finally, Ashoka University kept the promise it had made in its prospectus. My roommate was from Haryana, my dining mates were from Maharashtra and Punjab maybe, my music mates were from Madhya Pradesh, our music guide was from West Bengal and some of my friends were even from Ethiopia. All this diversity gave me a very important life lesson. I learned to rise above my own personal differences and prejudices. I learned to look at people from a different perspective and realized that heck, humans are nice beings after all. Not everyone is a school level bully or mean. In the process I learned what is respect and how I can respect people who are not from the same walks of life as me.
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