As my first semester in college comes to a swift end, I’m hit by the sudden realisation that I’ve already completed 1/8th of my college life, a thought that both scares me and motivates me at the same time. Nevertheless, within this small fraction of my college life, I still found myself riding a rollercoaster of emotions as I lived through a rush of unique experiences and moments that I continue to process.
As such, one of the biggest shocks to me was the change in my environment. All of a sudden, I was 1000s of kilometres away from home, left to fend for myself in a campus full of faces I’d never seen before, voices I’d never heard before and a language that I eventually gave up studying back in the 7th grade.
And the hardest yet most rewarding part of it all was finding comfort in chaos, navigating my way through it all with no guiding figures beside me anymore, and somehow staying surprisingly sane throughout.
A sentimental start
The vivid memories of my first week of college were some I would never forget.
I still remember sitting in Grub – one of the college cafes, amidst a swarm of students and parents just like us, as I sat with my parents one last time for all I knew.
I scrunched my eyes with fisted palms, trying my hardest to hold back the river of tears flowing down my face.
The thought of being away from home for the next 4 years with barely a few visits a year daunted me, and for someone who prided their parents as their biggest inspirational figures, it hit harder.
The melancholy of the atmosphere amplified as I glared at the faces of my parents. My dad looked at me with proud eyes and a bittersweet smile as he battled feelings of a missing presence with the quiet pride he had for his son. My mom, on the other hand, was fighting her own emotions as she, too, found this moment equally heart-aching, yet she continued giving her humdrum advice and lectures to numb the ache for the two of us.
Amidst all this, the irony of a cosy college couple, cuddling at the table right across us, didn’t help in any way, only adding salt to the wound and maybe making the whole moment a tad awkward.
The sentiments ended as I gave my parents a heartfelt farewell, and I watched their cab pull away with a heavy heart. At this moment, I found myself lost, with no one to tell me what to do and where to g.o I decided the next best thing would be to go wherever my feet take me and do what every fresher at college hopes to do on their first week – socialise.
Too many names to remember
The first week in college is just as everyone imagines it to be. There are countless events, mixers and jam sessions with seniors and other freshers, and all you find yourself doing is asking every other student you see the standard 3 questions you ask anyone as a fresher.
“What’s your name?”
“Which course are you?”
“Where are you from?”
And mind you, you’re probably gonna end up repeating these same 3 questions over a few 100 times in the span of your first month in college.
At first, it was fun. I felt like a social animal as I approached any random fresher I saw, diving into directionless conversations that at least ended up with me getting to know one more person, and by the end of the first week, I was knackered.
My social battery was drained
settling with the new
As weeks progressed, I gradually came to terms with the fact that I was in a completely new environment- and this would be my home for the next 4 years.
The hardest part of all this was to accept the fact that I’d have to form new friendships and bonds, none of which had yet remotely come close to the ones I had made back home. Moreover, there was also the heart-eating grief of losing people from my life, and acknowledging that there would be a good chance that I’d never see them again, as I officially closed the chapter of my life back at home.
This especially hit harder when I’d spent almost my whole childhood with my friends back home, and our bond was thicker than blood, that I would go as far as to call them my own brothers, and so with every new interaction, I searched for a piece of them in others, only to be dissatisfied, and sooner or later I realised that every person was different, and I’d have to learn to form bonds regardless of familiarity.
That was not the only thing I had to get used to, though. There was also the food factor. My appetite was for a toss as my body realised that shifting from one corner to another of a country would also come with a change in food and cuisine.
I went from eating crispy dosas as golden as the sun to thick parathas as fluffy as a pillow, from spicy sides of meat made with an abundance of masalas to the tangy yet one-dimensional flavours of sabjis.
Worst of all, my regular lunch of mounds of steamed, fluffy rice was now replaced with stacks of dense, thick and chewy chapatis that fought their way through my spoilt tastebuds.
All in all, the amount of delta around me all at once was somewhat overwhelming; nevertheless, it felt empowering as I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, knowing that at the end of it all, it would all be for the better, leaving me a more resilient person than before.
Exploration and endeavours
With all the change came the opportunity to explore and learn cultures, places and experiences that I never had the exposure to back at home.
From spiking volleyball for the first time in my life, to visiting a gurudwara in the heart of a bustling Chandni Chowk, to trying the real flavours of Delhi: from it’s popular chaap to its steaming juicy, hot momos; it was all a privilege to be exposed to and as much as i miss everything and everyone back home, I realised that the path to a happier time here is to accept, adapt and enjoy the process, a concept that my family stands by and a concept that I am slowly learning to come to terms with.