On the 3rd day at our training institute, we were asked to make a life map for ourselves: everything in our lives that has led up to this moment right here. It's not an easy task - reaching back into your life and buried memories and extracting both the happy and the painful; sharing intimate details with strangers. The connections and understanding between us that developed from it are hardly tangible at the moment. But the internal reflection helped me at least get a better sense of my decision to join Teach for India, and to get a better sense of myself.
Confused
Esters. Propane-2-ol. Complex organic compounds and whatever functions they were used for: I loved it. Organic chemistry was fascinating. Human biology was mesmerizing. And yet, here I am, a 21-year-old with an undergraduate degree in arts, who can't even remember what an ester is, how do I write propane-2-ol, or what those things are that we do with there compounds.
Life has changed. Yet one thing has remained constant: I still don't know what I want to do.
It's the question I was always asked. Being labelled as the "bright" student (colloqially known as a nerd), everyone had high expectations: "yeh toh zaroor kuch bada karegi." What that big thing was, I never knew. And again and again I was told that I would one day figure it out. And so it continues even today.
I loved biology and chemistry, yet decided to take up arts. I thought I really liked journalism, but am no longer interested in it. My list of things I don't want to do has always been huge, but the things I want to do has been empty.
People find it weird that I have absolutely no inkling of what I want to do. To be honest, so do I. I have moved from one sibject to another looking for inspiration - the kind that comes in the form of a light bulb switching on inside my head. It never came...at least, not until TFI. I wouldn't call it so much of a light bulb as a tube light that started flickering long ago and eventually came on.
Of course, the path in between the flickering was far from smooth.
Confused
Esters. Propane-2-ol. Complex organic compounds and whatever functions they were used for: I loved it. Organic chemistry was fascinating. Human biology was mesmerizing. And yet, here I am, a 21-year-old with an undergraduate degree in arts, who can't even remember what an ester is, how do I write propane-2-ol, or what those things are that we do with there compounds.
Life has changed. Yet one thing has remained constant: I still don't know what I want to do.
It's the question I was always asked. Being labelled as the "bright" student (colloqially known as a nerd), everyone had high expectations: "yeh toh zaroor kuch bada karegi." What that big thing was, I never knew. And again and again I was told that I would one day figure it out. And so it continues even today.
I loved biology and chemistry, yet decided to take up arts. I thought I really liked journalism, but am no longer interested in it. My list of things I don't want to do has always been huge, but the things I want to do has been empty.
People find it weird that I have absolutely no inkling of what I want to do. To be honest, so do I. I have moved from one sibject to another looking for inspiration - the kind that comes in the form of a light bulb switching on inside my head. It never came...at least, not until TFI. I wouldn't call it so much of a light bulb as a tube light that started flickering long ago and eventually came on.
Of course, the path in between the flickering was far from smooth.
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