Ritvik's Blog

"When the winds of change blow, some build walls, others build windmills" ~ Chinese Proverb Nearing the end of my days here, at VNIT Nagpur, I am already in the "Sab Moh Maya Hai" phase. As I start gearing up to face the outside world, I look back at the three years gone by and am astonished at how much the institute has changed. It's almost as if the current batch of 1st years have entered into a completely different college! From swanky 12-storeyed hostels, smart classrooms to boom barriers at the Main Gate! While everyone would agree that these are much-needed facelifts to the VNIT infrastructure, a much bigger transformation is being enforced on the heart of what a college is all about- its student community. When we came here, the environment was different. Our WhatsApp groups used to have messages on dress codes, the 'unofficial rules', places you can and cannot visit and what not! While I'm not here to defend these practices, I have t...

11th November 2016, 6PM. I was in the parking lot, walking back to my vehicle to go home after spending the day in the college. In the dark and shady parking lot, I accidentally saw a couple intensely making out. Realising that someone just saw them, they stopped and looked back at me, making the situation really awkward. I quickly took my phone out in a desperate attempt to unsee what I had just seen. I started to walk by them checking my messages and pretending nothing had happened. And suddenly, I stopped. I was shocked to see 30 messages, all congratulating me. I was like, What's this? ... I scrolled down and there was a group on which a senior had posted an image, I opened it and saw my name listed in the Core Committee of AXIS'17! We didn't know it back then, but this group of 13 were in for one heck of a journey. Our seniors told us to come to  Katta  as soon as we could and this was our first meeting as AXIS Core. Many things were told, many experiences sh...

Not a day passes by without me putting my headphones on and watching YouTube videos. From memes & cringe-pop to knowledge & inspiration, YouTube has it all! One YouTuber, however, has a special place in my heart. That is Lilly Singh aka IISuperwomanII . With 13 Million+ subscribers, Lilly Singh is the most popular YouTuber of Indian Origin.  If you haven't checked out her content, which rock have you been living under?! Her sketches are downright hilarious, real and so relatable! But the reason I love her so much is very personal. A little more than a year back, for various personal, academic and work-related reasons, I was going through hell. One moment, I'm on top of my game, and the other, I feel that everything around me is falling apart. From spending complete days in college, I started to spend them locked in my room, not wanting to come out. From oversleeping due to my love for sleep, I started oversleeping because I wanted to live in the make-believe dream...

Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, M. S. Dhoni: An Untold Story, Padman, Dangal, Sanju……… Wait, what? A bewda , a tharki, a drug addict. Sanjay Dutt is far from what the quintessential biopic material is like. Then why is Raju Hirani, arguably the best director we’ve seen in recent times, doing a biopic on him? I mean, have we run out of inspirational stories to start making biopics on people who helped terrorists? Right? Here’s the problem we all have with Sanju- We want all our idols to be ideals- people who have fought against the odds, wrestled against the rules of the society, so on and so forth to achieve success. We don’t want to watch a movie about a person who commits mistake after mistake and ends up in Yerwada Central Jail, convicted of illegal possession of an AK-56 rifle which was smuggled into India before terrorist attacks. But I still want to watch it. Why? Because I want to watch his ability to navigate his ship through the ups and downs. There would be very few peo...

“Getting a job is a dive. You can have a magnificent one. But you are in a swimming competition, not a diving competition.” I heard this somewhere a long time ago and it has become one of the many one-liners which I keep mentioning in my ‘deep-shit’ talks. But as I navigate my way through the peaks and troughs of engineering life, I realise more and more what our “education factories” have turned us into. Churned out in batches of thousands, we are expected to have the same knowledge, same skills, and the same strengths. At this juncture, it is rather easy and common to blame the institutes, the professors, and most importantly the ‘system’. But if you think about it, why wouldn’t they turn into factories? After all, they are delivering what is expected from them. After investing lakhs of Rupees and four years of one’s life, what is the minimum output every student expects? A job! That is what our education institutes seem to have reduced to, mere recruitment agencies, dancin...