Three, now coming up to four years ago, the sun rose rather unassumingly on an unremarkable day. For the mindless denizens scuttling around on the blue planet, it was a beginning of sorts. But then every day is.
A young, good looking boy with short hair and a gorgeous jaw line arose with reluctance. It wasn’t a day he wanted to experience. Freshly rankless in all engineering entrance examinations he was mildly discomforted. The beans he had gorged on the night before didn’t help matters either. Still he had breakfast to look forward to, after attending to matters in the loo of course.
Suddenly he groaned. He had just remembered. The counseling. Yes he had to travel to reach an aggravatingly distant counseling centre which promised him a faint hope of living out his dream. No, not the one with the bikini suits and martinis. The other one. The one which had him sitting on his butt, churning out software which made Steve Jobs and Bill Gates look like a collective band of clueless baboons. But then little did he know. They are already rich and life is a bitch.
College. The word which most fresh out of school teenagers associate with unprecedented freedom, sexual encounters and a lack of hygiene. Being a fresh out of school teenager himself, our protagonist was no different. Except for the exceptionally good looks. But more on that later.
Half an hour later, he emerged from the bath with dripping hair and an empty stomach. He passed his father on the way to the kitchen.
“Hey son,” the ever optimistic father said hoping to elicit a rare reply from the aforementioned son. “All set to decide your college life today?”
The son grunted disparagingly disappointing the father who had hoped for a lively discussion on last night’s cricket match. Still a grunt was better than the shrug he got on most days.
The boy, let’s call him R, called out to his diminutive yet surprisingly strong mother to feed him. She acquiesced giving him a plate of something which escapes this humble chronicler’s memory. R ate slowly while going over his short and eventless life. He sighed. His doting father mistook this as an opening for conversation.
“You know, you might get into a good college today. Anything might happen. Perhaps some seats are left in the good ones.”
R knew that this was false hope but he didn’t want an argument just now. “Yes father,” he said rolling his eyes when his father wasn’t looking.
“I mean I know this guy in my office whose son caught a lucky break yesterday. You might do the same.”
“Yes father.”
“Come on then. We haven’t got all day. Get dressed. We leave in an hour.”
***
Later that day, the family car drove across a dirt road into a dirty but popular college. So popular that it was the university counseling center for the entire region. R was asleep. It had been a long and boring drive. His father’s yelling woke him up.
“Get up you oaf,” thundered his father. Having to skip a relaxing lunch drove him into a foul mood. “We’re here.”
The family got out of the car and walked to the long line in front of the building. All engineering hopefuls accompanied by parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and other various members of a typically huge Indian family. It was hot, and the air was stale carrying a extremely bad odour, an important component of which was sweat. R and his family joined the line. The line as lines go was fairly important. It led inside the building where the students would be directed to a computer lab where they could sit down at a computer after depositing the counseling fees and list out their preferred colleges and streams in order of preference. The order was important often leading to hilarious anecdotes about how someone looking for Computer Science in a grade A college ended up in Mechanical Engineering in an entirely different college whose only claim to fame was that it was listed higher in the alphabetical list of colleges. Hilarious to everyone except the poor guy who had just wasted his non refundable counseling fees.
The line crept forward slowly giving R’s mother the opportunity to fish out various homemade delicacies from her hand bag and feed her family. By the time R reached the front of the line he was properly filled up on paranthas and chappati rolls. He approached the desk. On the other side of the desk sat three bored university officials who had been doing this for the past three days and would be here for another four. One of them passed R a form, asking him to fill it out and deposit it upstairs with the demand draft for the counseling fees. R filled the form awkwardly while a woman behind him poked him with her hand bag while asking another official inane questions which he didn’t want to answer. The form itself was a useless page of bureaucracy. R did have an enrollment number which if entered into the university’s database it would like any self respecting database answer any question on the form in sufficient detail. But then the three officials would have been redundant. And God forbid they lose their jobs.
After groaning inwardly at his luck, R ascended the narrow and dark stairwell and made his way to the computer lab. There he deposited his demand draft and the form and was assigned a computer. The old and pitifully slow computer already had a browser page open. A volunteer behind him gave him instructions on what to do. Of course all R needed to do was select colleges and streams from two drop down lists and make a list of his preferences in order of priority. One would think that an engineering hopeful had sufficient computer skills to do this simple task, but that didn’t stop the volunteer from teaching R everything from grasping the mouse to clicking the submit button. Against all odds R did manage to make up a short list of colleges he would prefer.
The list was short because R was incompetent and as a result had attained a pathetically low rank. Thus he had been called for counseling on the fourth day, while higher ranked people had already filled the seats in the better colleges. In fact had three new colleges not opened up that very day, R would have been out of luck. Still R did choose the college with the best sounding name. For his troubles he was given a printout of the list and dismissed summarily. R groaned again. He had to return the next day to find out whether he had managed to scrape together a seat in the college.
To avoid making a long story even longer, R managed to get into the Computer Science branch in this new and unproven college. Only time would show whether he had chosen wisely. Or as was more likely had he made the biggest mistake of his life. But for now this wise chronicler has run out of time.
Dude, you've managed to do what only a few hundred million other people are able to do every year:
Congratulations! You're mediocre.