Education Eureka Exploded

After 17 years of playing beer pong with coursework, classes and college, dyeing in Monday blues, indulging in food porn, waking up from caffeine comas, and surviving a day full of banter, sarcasm and capitalist hypocrisy, I learnt one thing.

The entire education journey was one, very long video game. The Assassin’s Creed kind. Absolute judgement, fraudulence, teamwork, atonement, ethics divide was all part of the academic package deal. It was the most exhausting, exhilarating encounter. All the needed culture was absorbed through the Greek yogurt, American holidays, British royal baby news, Italian bag and German cars. News wrap-up summed up in tweets, headlines and keeping with the Kardashians. Food was take-out or order in. Chores were an unpaid internship. Holiday was pre-planned and homework was postponed.

But there were prudent moments. Meeting deadlines at their very dead-end; leaving almost visible skid marks, dealing with narking team members either with putting up or pouting out, experimenting with exam studying styles: the chanting, the coping, the copying. We thought we were done with peer pressure and puberty when the pleasures and pressures of dating drama and dealing douchebags to drama duds came to picture.

The more serious times called for silencing phones and shutting the dorm door. I was always a little extreme. Study till the brink of forgetting again, memorize with every trick in the books, study through the nights and through the weathers and expect the best for this unrest. And I succeeded. At the last session of this video game, being pronounced a distinction holder, an MBA topper and a gold medalist, I asked my father, as a joke, if grades matter. My father—the perceived great grades gamer turned to me, smiled and shook a gentle, clandestine, no.