Dilli Diaries Chapter 2: I DON'T BELONG HERE!!!

My first week in LSR was … well, enthusiastic. Right after the orientation I was determined to try out many societies, do something creative and most importantly as someone said during the orientation, find my best friend for the rest of my life (meaning the next three years). After that initial glow faded away I realised the societies were hard to get selected to and even if I did, required a lot of effort, which considering my level of laziness, was insurmountable. 

My only hope was my classes, my love for the discipline of political science that is. I guess life has a way of making you question and re-analyse everything you thought you knew about every other thing. Put in simple english, what I meant to say was  I hated political science and my decision to study it with all my heart. Political Theory classes made absolutely no sense and within a span of two weeks, I was convinced that I was dumb and that my brain (if I had any) had decayed after my 12th boards. In simple words, I was a failure and was constantly miserable. My family back in Kerala had to bear the brunt – long calls complaining about everything from food to classes to a totally untrue assumption that my mother stopped loving me. I did get into a society but found the people there so brilliant that I was convinced my selection was a gigantic mistake. 

And friends? I couldn’t even picture my classmates as belonging to the same race. No, they were intellectual superiors and could never accept me as a friend. Even the people I knew back from school seemed to be fitting perfectly into the new scheme of things, except me. With a horror I realised what I was : a total misfit. A little too dramatic, isn’t it? Well that’s how in my mind everything was.

But something prevented me from quitting. (I’m pretty sure that it was embarrassment of going home as a failure) When you are forced to stay somewhere for a long time, mostly you tend to develop a sense of closeness to people in close proximity (need for affiliation. Yup, this is the Psychology geek in me ) So long story short, I started to talk to people and I realised that even for the most comfortably adjusted people, the starting wasn’t so easy. The change from school to college is a period of transition and it takes time, my seniors assured me. I also realised even the others had a difficult time understanding concepts and struggled with esteem issues. Slowly, I understood I was not so different from others. 

And friends? I made my first close friend close to the end of the first semester – that too not a Malayali and not a talkative person ( interestingly enough, somebody who does not like people who talk a lot and clearly had a not so good first impression of me.)like I thought I would make. By the end of two semesters, we had another friend (again not a Malayali and not talkative, I should really cross that off list). And I got two amazing roommates (and superiorly crazy ones) who are my family in Delhi now. Juliya, who was always a friend has gotten more close to me now and the biggest surprise, a senior who is now the President of the society (which I’m an inactive member of) is a close friend and flatmate now. I also found my personal bodyguard in Kevin.

A lot of things happened in the course of one academic year and all of them taught me one thing – Sure, I had carved my niche in Kerala but Delhi is also my place. I do belong here.