Day Zero of College Life

Day zero—that is, the last day of all the counselling hassles: a tough phase that made mom toil more than me, perhaps. And this was the finale to the entire worry and we decided to celebrate it through a little treat in the college canteen. OK, I admit, it wasn't a treat, we were plain hungry. So after all the work was over, mom and I stepped into this place that we never really bothered to notice much on our earlier visits. At the max, I, mom or dad would drop in to get some snack and then leave. But today, we were gonna have a proper meal here. For me, it was totally a different feeling being in this very eminent part of the lavishly green and tidy campus, particularly today. Why? Well, because today, I was sitting here as a student, okay, a soon-to-begin student. There was a feeling of belongingness and pride, of course. But these weren't the only feelings.

Enter this building and... oops... did I forget to name it? Well, it needs no description for any DCEiite I guess. For us, the place is LEGEN-DARY! and so it will remain. Yes of course, it is the canteen, the Mech-canteen, that I am talking about. (no, I didn't know why it was called so. Only after some time of being here did I realize that it's a canteen in the Mechanical block of the campus and hence called the 'Mech canteen'/'Mech-C'/'Mech-cant'. How (un)intelligent of me, you might say.)

Happiness ka Menu! :P 

So, I and mom enter this Mech-canteen, after a hot, tiring day, but a satisfying one. I enter, of course with mom besides me. We take our meals: idli sambhar, dosa and chowmein too I guess—food items that no more excite me that much, for obvious reasons, it's been one full year after all and the taste hasn't changed a BIT! But yes, at that point of time, it was good enough to relish ( and very cheap too :P)

We were just stuffing ourselves up, I, a bit more reluctantly, I remember. A little awkwardness and an urge of nervousness, perhaps clearly apparent on my face - must be so, how else would mom feel the need to utter these words of 'comfort' to me—"why that expression? thinking what? get ready now, this is where you're gonna eat every day from now on! Cheer up!" I doubt my own calling mom's words as words of 'comfort'. On a second thought, the statement looked more like a statutory warning, of the journey I was to embark upon, a significant chapter of my life and a very important one at that.

Mind you, my nervousness was a little different from that of any other fresher. Any other fresher, I assume, will have a mixture of the emotions of nervousness and excitement a 'little' unbalanced on the pans of a balance scale, but for me, the pan containing the feeling of nervousness was definitely the heaviest one, for more reasons than one. Let's see what my reasons were...

Did I ever mention that I studied in an all-girls school from class 3rd to class 12th? That too, a rather strictly disciplinarian convent school, where our teachers didn't refrain from giving free (motherly — atleast I felt so) advice over just about anything they felt was going wrong with the child... even if it was a little personal, I guess. No, I never minded that, to be honest, it's because of some really beautiful people there who I got the guiding light from, that I miss my school more than my friends.

But that is an altogether another phase of life that you might get to read about, somewhere in near future. As of now, my point was to highlight how and why I was dead nervous, while sitting on one of those many marbled seats in the fairly big and spacious cafeteria with mom. 

You know what,  for a girl who hasn't really been out, who finds it difficult to adjust in a new environment, though only initially, who isn't all that outgoing with and among new people AND to top on that, is from a girl's school; you can understand what exactly could have made her heck nervous, coz the situation has everything that she dreads- a completely new place, totally new  (read- unknown) people, the fear that she will soon need to be here, everyday AND that too minus mom to back up and lastly, err... guys. 


Lemme tell you, when you are one such girl, who gets nervous thinking of how will she be able to gather enough guts to face this new world confidently, how will she be able to adjust in a co-ed environment for the next four years from now on, after having spent a decade in an all-girls environment with no other significant interaction outside and other such scary thoughts to make her blood cold enough, the life awaiting ahead seems all the more frightening. A personal experience — when YOU are not able to lift your eyes to look around, being wreck nervy ... it seems as if every other eye is on you, even if it is not! (P.S- in most cases, those eyes are really on you, no? Remember my post about staring? If no, here it is :- Staring )
So that was me, on day ZERO—the day before I began my life as a student of Delhi College of Engineering -> Delhi Technological University (SILENCE!)

—> heck nervous, freaked out, a bit excited, afraid ( of what else but, ragging - that never happened! Good or bad? Good- coz no ragging occurred, bad coz no INTERACTION occurred, but anyway...), thrilled, flooded with thoughts .....etc etc; a not so unique concoction of the typical emotions that I go through while taking my first step towards any destination, this one was different though, it was bound to be, very different.