Something about myself hmm... I am not quite sure how to describe myself when detached from my soul-sucking corporate job in data analytics. I would love to call myself an artist but that’s too honourable of a word for all that I manage to draw/write a handful of times in a year.
But if you wanna hear me rant, read ahead…
I studied architecture for five years, it could have been an incredible chance of finding my creative path but sadly it wasn’t. I loved it when I started, it was like a dream come true of going to something like an art school! But eventually, I got caught up in the anguish and confusion of what-ifs, only to be broken further by an utterly incompetent education system running at the mercy of some oldie non-practising ‘Architects’ deriving pleasure from threatening to tear apart their students' designs instead of teaching them anything much. It didn’t help that most college seniors weren’t pursuing design after graduating, since our college offered an alternative shot at high-paying IT jobs if you were ready to grind a little for placements and that’s what most of us did including myself. I felt lost when I did not find anyone I could look up to until it was very late, or maybe that's what I told myself when I shut the doors to a career in architecture.
It’s bittersweet to look back, only to realize how I’ve been pulled and pushed by the creative fields. As a kid who used to say “I want to become an artist when I grow up”, to the teenager who got nudged along to a popular rat race in India: IIT-JEE prep. I had almost accepted that I was gonna be an engineer after all, then just 2 months before the entrance exam, I got to know about Architecture (yeah, I kinda had no clue, hailing from a small town, Architect wasn’t exactly a common word in my list of professions), and that I could pursue it at IITs/NITs too! Even though I secretly wished to study at the prestigious School of Planning and Architecture (SPA) and filled out its form too. Then the results were out and as a great reveal to my parents I wouldn’t make it to any other stream with my JEE rank lol, Architecture seats often closed at lower ranks than other branches and that was all I could get with mine. So, it boiled down to Architecture from IIT vs. from SPA, and as a level-headed middle-class Indian, I went ahead with the former.
How stupid it feels to think that fate found a way out for me, that it literally handed me something so close to an artistic career out of nowhere, only for me to lose it to a corporate job later. Lately, I lie in my bed helplessly wondering if this is it?! If I’m gonna spend most of my life serving corporate in anxiety and hollowness, with nothing to create. It makes me very sad, to say the least. So, I put up tiny bits of thoughts and experiments here on Medium sometimes to preserve my sanity, that’s all this profile is. If you kept reading till here, I just want to thank you for witnessing this part of me that I don’t wanna lose but having a hard time keeping alive :’)
Maybe it was never meant to be... Or maybe someday someone will come up to me and tell me that they want to see me create things with my own hands, and maybe that day, when I take my eyes off the Excel on my screen to look at them, I will see the person I want to be. Life has gifted me a miracle once, and perhaps it's wrong to ask for another, but for a person who doesn't feel like a person anymore, what else is there to do if not hope?
