A PASSION….AN OBSESSION…..

The time: November 2006…… The place: National Institute of Technology, Rourkela……People of our batch in the final year of the engineering days……….and so was I………..During the time of my counseling, I had got into Ceramic Engineering at the institute not into Metallurgy and Material Sciences Engineering since I felt that the prospects for an MS degree in Ceramic Engineering were definitely better since the competition was but of course less………..Then I changed my branch to Chemical Engineering………..But getting back to November 2006 again……….Since we were in the final year of our degrees, hordes of people out there were pulling the place down saying they were preparing for CAT……….I had already gone through the dilemma of whether a CAT, GATE or a GRE………….GRE dreams had died down since long because of the practical problems associated with it…………Lots of useless financial strain for simply enabling myself to get an MS…………and talking about GATE, I wasn’t simply able to motivate myself for it…………May be because in the deepest corner of my heart, I felt I was personally not cut-out to make myself stable in the revered field of Chemical Engineering……….So that left the CAT with me……….I remember dad urging me to sit for the CAT…………He said, I will pay you the fees for the exam……….Just sit for it dude……….Don’t let the year slip out of your hands…….Just sit for it as a practice attempt…………..Now I feel that may be I should have listened to him…………I have always repented whenever I don’t listen to him but I still don’t stop doing that……………..anyways…………my justification was, I don’t want to sit for some exam for which I hadn’t prepared in the slightest bit………..I seriously felt I could not have done justice to the exam…………I enjoyed the final year in the college……….and the only thing that was on my mind then was to get into a job, take a break from studies for a year, come back fresh armed with enough preparation to be able to do justice to the exam…………This was all going well, albeit I must add shamelessly that the preparation was almost again tending to be a big zilch…………Fun and frolic with friends, booze parties, time with my girl friend, the joy of getting paid while on bench was really taking a heavy toll on my focused preparation…………Then came the time of the relocation…….sometimes I really feel thankful for that………….Almost immediately setting foot in Bangalore, there was CAT 2007………..This time I had decided to sit for the exam just to prepare myself for CAT 2008……….. I just wanted to know my strengths, weaknesses, and most importantly, I wanted to gauge the correlation between the efforts I had put in totally that year with the percentile I was able to achieve………although I again must admit shamelessly that the total hours I had put in counted to a meagerly 12 hours…………which was like laughable……….Anyways, it was during that time that I joined PaGaLgUy……….and have been following it religiously………..my pagal quotient although came out to be a decent 74%...........This is the year I feel the maximum motivation for CAT……….Yesterday, I was going through a thread in PG that described how people have made it into their dream destinations for an MBA…………After a lot of posts, I was like “WOW”……..Since yesterday, I have been harboring a silent aim to write in that thread someday……….What always matters in a race is the focus…….focus on the end of the race……..focus on emerging out the winner and nothing less than that……..and you know what……that particular thread has motivated me like nothing ever has…………The struggles, tribulations, the determination, the words, the blogs all show that CAT is not just an exam………it is definitely a way of life just like AOE or even CS for that matter……….In college, a friend had said me that don’t do an MBA for the money…………Do it if you really want it………I hadn’t quite taken his words seriously………..For me, it had been just the money then………….But now I realize, that guy had been feeling what I am feeling now some months earlier………..This is really the first time in my life that the want to achieve something has got so ingrained into my psyche that I am ready to burn myself just for that one chance…………It no longer is the money or the education or the competition or the fact that I want to prove my colleagues that I am a lot better than them that is the motivating factor…………In fact I don’t know what is……..But there is something that I want to prove to myself………..During the time of some of the previous posts, I had said that my MBA will be for the people I hate as well as for the people I love but you know what………..It no longer is that anymore not for my Dad, or my Mom or my Love or Deba Bhai for that matter…………Its seriously something I want to do just for myself…………For proving to myself that I am a star………….not necessarily a genius or anything but definitely capable of setting a goal and achieving it…………I never had done that earlier in my life………..I kept on switching my focus…………desultorily and aimlessly moving on………..almost like wasting my life, getting satisfied with whatever life gave me…….I had never set goals, never made my own way, never had I forced life to give me what I wanted……it was almost like a hollow existence ( Papa I do realize the significance of your words now and I am sorry for almost never having listened to you……You are so right always)………….but now I have a goal…………and you know something else……… I have already seen an almost magnificent engineering life and now I want to see another sort of a magnificent life again………..Its something that I owe myself…………Its something that really has got into my psyche this time………..There really is something about this thing that makes falling in love with it indispensable…………During my +2 days, I remember studying was a sort of compulsion……..My dreams and aims had to be forced onto me by my parents……….God I was such an imbecile then………..Wish I could have shown even a bit more of a conviction and strength then……….You know what, CAT is already making me feel a lot grown-up than I ever was……There is definitely some magic in this thing…….It has really shown me facets of myself I was totally ignorant about or may be I was too lazy to see them……I don’t know how, when and why I fell in love with it but I am definitely starting to enjoy the preparation now………..In fact this is almost the first time in my life that I am, in fact, looking forward to a certain exam, preparing for some exam because I seriously want to, setting up a goal without someone else defining the guidelines for me………….Like they say, there has always got to be a first time in everyone’s life…………….. And yes……mark my words…….someday I will be writing about my journey on that PaGaLgUy thread definitely………….someday I will for sure……………