College Woes

                                                                  

A straight-forward explanation of an experience that has taught and scarred many of the youth. It is the period of life where your sights are always clouded by letters,numbers and ambitions.

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Chaos can pursue you anywhere. You may be crying today but will probably be enjoying tomorrow. Reeling from grief takes time, getting used to pressure takes time so to handle ourselves we take solace in certain things. The pandemic has had a colossal impact on my outlook to life and has taught me to think more about everything.

My college routine like every other college is strenuous and demanding to the point that I literally nearly tanned myself by standing in the sun because I hadn’t experienced it in a long time. I was made to take extra classes that lasted until 8 in the night. They were rewarding at some point but my regular study took a toll as I could only afford to study for two hours from 10pm till midnight. Then I would fall asleep so hard, my morning prayers used to be in danger. Our reporting time is rather nice as it starts from 10am in the morning, but rigorous studying really burns you out. This continued for a whole month until I had to request the principal to let me off early so that I could spend more time for theory. This backfired too because I had gotten into the habit of studying from 10pm till midnight, so I got very frustrated. This in turn ruined my second mid term examinations as all of them except biology and maybe even physics were lousy. And I have an issue with my sleep. I must in all conditions fulfill at least 4 hours of sleep. Less than that, I get sick. As you can clearly see, this was an endless cycle of mutual destruction.

I would like to add that I stubbornly didn’t give up on my religious duties because I believe that God is our biggest and our strongest supporter. My way of dealing with stress also revolved around playing a game I have recently started to really like. I am not a gamer but this game really relaxed me without using up my neurons. Its quests are often little heartwarming stories that are not necessarily all about fantasy.

Genshin impact is a game that I had initially a strong feeling of disinterest. I wasn’t a fan of the overly colorful intricacy of the game but it had become so popular it had even taken over YouTube. After having randomly popped inside my head like a little satanic seed, I downloaded it and a completely new thing caught me very much off guard and got me into it. It wasn’t the characters, or the lore, or even the quests. It was the simple fact that the landscapes captured in the game are so mesmerisingly accurate and breathtaking that I spent my time only in exploration  rather than doing the important stuff. The picturesque waterfalls, the pretty grass fields and the impeccably realistic lake sides…coupled with the hyper realistic natural sounds right into your ears was a feast to behold. 

On a funnier note, the game is also known to have a very good voice acting cast. Some of the characters have unexpectedly different voices than their looks and it is a nice surprise factor. I, for once, was very misled by a character named Zhongli- an ex-god who used to rule over the Land of Contracts. His appearance is that of a brooding yet charismatic, unrealistically- handsome gentleman. I expected him to sound like a young adult but he sounded far more mature, exactly like someone who has seen the world for what it is. 

Another startling moment was when there was a cut scene that involved our avatar (the twin that we chose; the male is called Aether and the female twin is called Lumine. The selection of your avatar is permanent as it changes all the cut scenes with respect to the twin you chose) running away from guards due to being suspected for murder. After being chased into the corner, the twin flips out their sword, ready to fight but  at that precise moment , a voice could clearly be heard saying ‘ Hey Girlie, hold still’. No sooner said than done, a young man, seemingly in his twenties, brown-haired and tall with blue eyes does an impressive leap and subdues all the guards with his bow and arrows. After that he whisks us away to a safer place. The story after that is not important but the mere fact that I was so preoccupied the entire time by doing this thing where you are supposed to be very vigilant of the guards around you as you try to escape, the line mentioned above rang into my ears loud and clear above the din. It set my heartbeats racing for a second because I was wearing headphones and the directors of the game probably thought that setting off their fans for a cool character who has a bad-boy charm to him would increase their profits from the game.  For reference, the character’s name is Tartaglia alias Childe . I know it’s an off-putting name but that is a good, off-putting alias for an off-putting, charming and incredibly cunning guy like him.( I never trusted him in the beginning and I was right to do so because he almost destroyed a nation by waking up a monster from beneath the seas.)

My days in the blue blazer of our college, the all-important lectures, the heavy assignments, the pressure of weekly tests and the stress to keep performing well drove me into holes like these. And it did not end there. Before our night classes had started I even volunteered to cook chapattis for dinner (It is a kind of bread that is considered as the main weapon of a woman in her household. Females who are unable to cook this particular bread or who are even slightly imperfect in it are deemed as failures to their family, ancestors and nation. Just kidding. ). My chapattis are slightly decent enough to be passable though. It would be a shame not to learn it. People might say that cleaning or organizing your things is a great way to relieve stress but believe me, I know and it has worked but currently I am trying very hard to break out of my shabby nature.

I do not know if it is common or not but a strange sense of depressing unity settles between all the college mates. I was so done when a certain period of time passed that I was reminding myself that I didn't care, all the while grinding my pen to memorize the stupid derivations and equations.

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