To a new beginning

I never expected any of this to happen. And even today, starting with the second day of college it feels surreal. On 2nd June at 6.26PM I got a mail that I had been hoping and waiting for since three years. For three years I had been dreaming about the place that I had been in love with. And for the past five months preceding June, I had been obsessed with just one name - Ashoka. 

The first time I heard about Ashoka University was during the later months of class 9. Of course, at that time Ashoka was just a concept that had not taken the form of bricks and stone. Being a naive fourteen year old and the most disinterested person in academics I decided to ignore it. But somehow the name Ashoka kept propping up here and there. 

Enter class tenth and I started to think what I want from life. I started to think about how I can just not continue with sciences and mathematics after class 10th. I loved history and literature and I would be putting myself in a precarious position if I didn't go with the latter option. I was not one of those people who could take up sciences in class eleven just to please my teachers or the society in general. And yet once again the name Ashoka propped up. It entered into its first year as a brand new private university and with a modest batch strength of about 120 students. 

Well, that made me think. On top of that my dad kept telling me the kind of students that Ashoka had taken. Even if you wanted you couldn't find flaws in those kids and that is how perfect they were as my dad used to say. A lot of them had left some of the top premier institutions to come here. I always wondered why would they come to a brand new private university putting everything at stake. Notice how I used the word private. But if those kids did come to Ashoka, it must have something. It must have some strong magnetic forces to pull out the cream of the country in just the first year of its opening.

I was inspired. That is the time I started dreaming about this place because knowing myself I knew I could never even think of getting in. Then my dad took up a semester course at Ashoka for the first batch in the second semester. And after spending a jolly weekend at Ashoka full of passionate students and the wonderful Dhabha paranthas, he would tell us tales that would already transport me to my dream college. I had no idea what I’ll be doing there. I just wanted to be there.

Fast forward to when we shifted to Delhi. My dad one fine day decided that he wants to visit the one place he has been able to love as much as IIT Kanpur (Maybe More). So I obviously decided to tag along to see the fictional place that me and my mom had only heard stories about. No kidding but the place took my breath away. And this is just the infrastructure I’m talking about, even though it was still quite a mess seeing how a lot of it was still being constructed. The students were probably the nicest people I met on this planet Earth and they differed so much from my perception of college students considering I largely had IIT Kanpur students and a few examples from IIIT Delhi as my prototype.

The very same year I applied for the Young Scholars Program at Ashoka and I was very fortunate to be part of the founding batch for YSP at Ashoka University and that reinforced in me the faith and the belief that Ashoka is where I want to be and nowhere else ( not that I didn't have other backup plans).

Maybe the stars were in my favour all this while but the first lucky sign was when they gladly decided to extent the deadline for the second round to 30th April which gave me some time to still be part of the second round even though my application and especially my two essays were a bit hurried. Not to say I'm not proud of what I wrote. All this while I was so paranoid that I may not even get a call for the interview because I never had the confidence in me. I never believed in myself until maybe now. 

For the whole of second June, I was in a foul mood not knowing what'll happen. Most probably I was not getting in but I was still anxious to know. Even a formal no would have been ok, as far as we had some form of communication. But the email that I received at 6.26PM was not expected. They wrote to me saying they were glad to offer me a seat in their University. I was in Pune at that time and I probably shook the whole of Pune for bearing up with my excitement. I wanted to dance jump cry everything all at once. I didn't know what to feel, what to say, who to talk to etc. I was in a state of shock and maybe after all this time I've still not recovered and I pinch myself every day to make sure it's real and has got nothing to do with me sleepwalking into Ashoka.

I can not describe the euphoric feeling that I have. The whole of the last two days has been spent in doing nothing but packing unpacking and grinning like someone who has just been told I love you by their significant other. I've never felt so good about me or the decisions that I've made. People especially my teachers and a lot of others have repeatedly questioned my decision to join a ‘private university which encourages nothing but parties and substance abuse’(for all those who don't know what Ashoka is). But one day I hope that all these people will be saying with pride that this girl, Surabhi Sanghi graduated from Ashoka University has made all very proud.