Emancipation

It’s finally over. Ah, the inexplicable joy! The tutorials and the test series have all come to an end, although ephemerally. To wake up almost every morning to give a tutorial or a test when you sleep late into the night is a harrowing experience as many will tell you. I suddenly feel so liberated. I can safely bet that no one understands the value of a free day more than us here at BITS Pilani ! Only the incessant test series and tutorials designed to make students go haywire make you realize how invaluable a single free day is: a day without alarms, tutorials and classes.

If I were given the option of deleting two words from my life today, those would definitely be continuous evaluation. For those outside this village (or is it a town now?), continuous evaluation is a system of incessant pestering used by instructors against students, especially those who do not cram regularly, using various innovative techniques such as surprise quizzes, assignments and tutorials. Rumors have it that such a system was initiated here to keep students engaged in this isolated non-descript place which offered very little scope of whining away time. But now with the advent of the invaluable little port in our rooms, do we need to be kept busy? No points for answering that! What else can be the logic behind this highly unpopular way of evaluation? Some would defend the system by saying that regular evaluation moulds students into professionals who are well versed in their respective fields and have strong fundamentals. I don’t know how many people would buy that as many IIT (except our poor cousins at IIT-Kanpur) grads are doing just fine without going through the rigors of continuous evaluation. And if we go by that logic, why not just have four test series? I’m not even thinking that far! When you just get some hours to read scores of pages out of the various tomes prescribed for our CDCs, one starts cramming rather than comprehending. Enough about how bad things can get here but on the flipside, an important benefit of this system is that if you get out of Pilani alive, you would most probably never commit suicide!!

The chilly mid-October breeze not just marks the end of our tests but also brings along with it, as a panacea, yet another edition of our much anticipated annual cultural fest, Oasis 2008. The fest this year is set to scale new heights with the likes of K.K. and Euphoria (& the girls from Dilhi of course!) coming down to Pilani to enthrall the crowds. If that doesn’t satiate you, the rock bands performing during Rocktaves definitely will. Check out this link on what’s new this Oasis. Another blessing in disguise that Oasis brings with it is the opportunity to return back to modern civilization. Most of the creatures who call Pilani home make optimum use of this opportunity and so will I when I board the 2310 NDLS PNBE Rajdhani on 23.10. So until then, Au revoir!

The Road to Success

Success is something that we all clamour for throughout our lives. A sizable chunk of our efforts is directed towards this end. However, despite our zeal to succeed, success does remain quite elusive. What is it that makes some people click while others fail? A lot of people will tell you that the path to success is marked by the dint of sheer hard work and effort. They will tell you that you just have to put in your efforts and success will surely follow, sooner or later. That statement does hold true but just sheer hard work won’t do. What a lot of us don’t comprehend is that success is also a mind game. With same amount of effort, one person might succeed while another might fail miserably in his endeavour. If we set a few things straight in our minds, the path to success might not be all that excruciating.

The initial and most crucial step to success is to start believing in oneself. This is where a lot of us go awry and hence miss out on a lot of success in life. Almost all of us heavily underestimate our competence and intelligence. We have a predetermined attitude towards things and it is generally not in the affirmative. Quite often, we believe that we can’t achieve or attain something even before we embark on the journey to get it. When you already are asserting to yourself that you won’t be able to do it, you most probably would not. Hence our attitude and outlook towards our goals should the first thing to go for a makeover. Believing that you will be able to achieve something is the first step towards achieving it. So from the next time you embark on a mission, start in the affirmative rather than relying on pessimism. Yeah, it is a tad difficult to implement at first but gradually it becomes a part of our system. We need to understand that negative thoughts and pessimism will not lead us anywhere while it would definitely erode our chances of succeeding. Positive thoughts do not cost a thing but go a long way in aiding us in succeeding in our efforts.

So would just optimism be enough to take us all the way? Nah, one has move a step further. Now that one is moving in the right direction, one has to decide where he or she wants to go. Unless you know where you are going, you will definitely end up elsewhere. Not knowing where we are headed is another big drawback in most of us. Quite a few of us have a fatalistic approach to life and we believe that destiny will lead us to our destined fates. This approach to life is a result of going about life aimlessly because without targets, whatever we achieve is by the grace of god. A fixed quantified target helps us visualize and sail smoothly through the path to success. A vague target generally makes the journey much more arduous.

Another very important ingredient for success in life is creativity. Being creative goes a long way in helping us achieve difficult tasks. Every person deals with a situation in a unique way but generally it is seen that most of us take the oft-treaded path as it is the least risky. Treading on a new path requires a lot more effort and patience as there are no signs to show us the way out but a person who takes old paths can never discover new destinations. Similarly, getting to higher levels of achievement requires us to be extremely creative.

One might ponder why all this is so necessary. Obviously, success has no prerequisites as such and one can succeed without having a fixed goal or without much creativity. The old adage that “Success breeds success and failure breeds failure” still has a lot of relevance today. Once we learn to visualize our goals and start achieving them with a sense of optimism, success will slowly but surely become an integral part of our lives.