This isn't really me. I don't like corporate culture even if I might fit in it. I don't love the idea of this being "what I do". So I need to ensure it isn't. I'm not nuts about the way corporations are organized and run. At any rate, I'm not interested in playing the game.
I'm doing this for the same reason many are - money. There are too many bills to be paid. Too many debts. Too much at stake. Including my dignity & my sanity. I don't know if you're supposed to identify yourself by what your job is. It's only your means of livelihood. Only!
But I know, as a thinking, sentient human being, that there are other things on earth worthier of spending my life doing. And I will do them. For the life of me. I will not lose my faith.
I am afraid of insecurity. And exhausted with poverty. Working this job ensures that I can sustain myself and building a career on this will ensure fiscal independence - freedom - that I can't really guarantee any other way. But I will not fool myself about it. I haven't. And I won't because I really can't.
Life on this planet is great. It's vast, endless and impossibly multiversal. It would be a shame to waste it in this straight and narrow.
That other thing ... it's not duty. The minute I do something there because of some self-righteous sense of duty born out of obligation ... it's all over. Fresh start then. Wrap up...
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Work
Work is more than a paycheck. It's dignity. It's respect. It's whether or not you can look your child in the eye and say "we're going to be alright."
Saturday, August 16, 2008
The day everything gave way
15 Aug 08
12:00 PM
I will work this job with dilgence, discipline and focus. And I will pursue my other goals while at it.
I will never forget where I was.. am.. penniless, stubbornly principled, even with practically nothing. The way I looked at cars... money... credit card swipes... cash... luxuries.
15 Aug 08
2:27 PM
I kept it alive with no money. Now I will have to keep the flame burning with cash in my hand. I underestimated the power of capital in individuals' lives. It's the reason people work jobs. The reason things happen. Money is a big deal... very big and pervasive. Influential in every way big or small. It is important to understand this overwhelming fact. Although money.. is not everything.
16 Aug 08
2:11 PM
Even though you're drunk on happiness now, remember that your life henceforth is a luxury. You can be as oblivious as anybody if you chose to.
There are no excuses anymore.
16 Aug 08
830 PM
Don't set material goals for yourself. Their pursuit will be meaningless and exhausting. If you achieve them, the success will be shallow, shortlived and intensely disappointing.
16 Aug 08
9 PM
The pledge I made at the temple
I will work diligently in my job. I will respect my job and perform to fulfill it. I will be grateful to the intent of the person who has offered me this opportunity.
I will be fortunate like few others in the world. I will have the fortune to provide for myself and more - something few people manage though millions want and dream of doing it.
I will not confine my life to my own well-being and happiness. I will strive to fulfill my larger role in the world - as my conscience knows.
My friends love me and care for me. I will be grateful to them and return this, unrequited and manifold.
But my parents have loved me, cared for me and toiled to their bones to provide for me all my life. I am forever indebted to them and it is my sworn duty to give them happiness, ease their burden and eradicate their misery. My sister deserves nothing but the best and I will help her get it.
I will renew this pledge again and I will fulfill it.
At 24 years of age, I am an able, capable adult. I can get up and do what others ponder but don't know how to act upon. Until I begin doing that, I too will not be closing that gap between ideas and action.
12:00 PM
I will work this job with dilgence, discipline and focus. And I will pursue my other goals while at it.
I will never forget where I was.. am.. penniless, stubbornly principled, even with practically nothing. The way I looked at cars... money... credit card swipes... cash... luxuries.
15 Aug 08
2:27 PM
I kept it alive with no money. Now I will have to keep the flame burning with cash in my hand. I underestimated the power of capital in individuals' lives. It's the reason people work jobs. The reason things happen. Money is a big deal... very big and pervasive. Influential in every way big or small. It is important to understand this overwhelming fact. Although money.. is not everything.
16 Aug 08
2:11 PM
Even though you're drunk on happiness now, remember that your life henceforth is a luxury. You can be as oblivious as anybody if you chose to.
There are no excuses anymore.
16 Aug 08
830 PM
Don't set material goals for yourself. Their pursuit will be meaningless and exhausting. If you achieve them, the success will be shallow, shortlived and intensely disappointing.
16 Aug 08
9 PM
The pledge I made at the temple
I will work diligently in my job. I will respect my job and perform to fulfill it. I will be grateful to the intent of the person who has offered me this opportunity.
I will be fortunate like few others in the world. I will have the fortune to provide for myself and more - something few people manage though millions want and dream of doing it.
I will not confine my life to my own well-being and happiness. I will strive to fulfill my larger role in the world - as my conscience knows.
My friends love me and care for me. I will be grateful to them and return this, unrequited and manifold.
But my parents have loved me, cared for me and toiled to their bones to provide for me all my life. I am forever indebted to them and it is my sworn duty to give them happiness, ease their burden and eradicate their misery. My sister deserves nothing but the best and I will help her get it.
I will renew this pledge again and I will fulfill it.
At 24 years of age, I am an able, capable adult. I can get up and do what others ponder but don't know how to act upon. Until I begin doing that, I too will not be closing that gap between ideas and action.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Irony
that I am on the internet to note this. It occurred to me that -
Too much time spent on the internet at my computer is affecting my ability to think coherently, multilaterally, complexly and with focus.
Too much time spent on the internet at my computer is affecting my ability to think coherently, multilaterally, complexly and with focus.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Self-preservation is vital
Self-preservation is vital - I can't lose things I worked so hard to find and staked so much to defend.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
quote unquote quote shut up
This is an exchange (over sms) I had with Madhav. It's two conversations after a point.
Sidd: The least corporate-subservient, least corporate-reliant, least corporate-benumbed, least socially indifferent, most literate, most panicked lot of us that seek answers to the big questions in facts and ground realities are often conveniently labeled far-left or far-left-liberal or radical-liberal, when we scream upon finding the answers. Those of us who can't sleep at night after reading Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn or even just comfortably tune out. Those of us who can't conveniently dismiss the hard realities and harder solutions tirelessly researched and evinced by the likes of Ralph Nader and Michael Moore.
Madhav: Zinn, Chomsky and Nader have well defined causes. Most of them spurred on my personal experiences.
Sidd: Yes. And they're always either glossed over as scholars, or berated, in Nader's case, as some sort of spoiler or perennial wolf-crier.
Madhav: I'm just asking you what you're outraged about. Where does that stem from?
Sidd: Tell me how much bearing, if at all, their work has on public policy. And how much representation, if any, they have in the mainstream media.
Madhav: What media? What issues? Which country? Why are you this pained by it? What causes are naturally closer to you? Are these?
Sidd: YES, YES, YES. As an Indian, American foreign policy has immense bearing on me. As a member of a more imperfect democracy than theirs, the systematic dismantling of US public dissent and the neo-liberalization and corporatization of American power is of immense concern to me.
Madhav: That would be of academic interest. What action is that going to bring?
Sidd: Why academic, man? How delineated are cross-national domestic policies these days? Dow chemicals, Citibank, McDonalds, Nike, Exxonmobil and Shell operate in almost every country on earth, so why shouldn't I be concerned? I resent the idea of it being of mere academic interest to me. I think certain human rights, and consequently, laws, are of universal concern to everyone everywhere.
Madhav: What can you do? Is my question. You have to get to core influences and understand your place. Otherwise it is just pointless romance. A long distance relationship with a girl who couldn't care less. Always ends badly.
Sidd: That's a flawed analogy. Here's how I see it - if their corporations are feeding my kids feces - Hollywood, McDonalds, Coke, I had bloody well be concerned about what's happening there and how. I also believe that knowledge empowers you in ways you cannot estimate yet. A keen understanding about American constitution (or rights in UK) will empower me here in India, a less transparent, more noisy scenario. Think of it conversely as well - if pockets of informed resistance hadn't protested their own foreign policy, from out there in US soil, we might all be in US outposts by now. It matters, immensely, for a literate person. I don't feel disenfranchised that I can't vote in the US, I feel enlightened knowing that some day, I might be able to use similar premises to hold my authority figures' feet to the fire.
Madhav: Yeah. While you do that, I'll be in power. So it'll work out well. You're talking about a general understanding. I'm talking about using it.
Sidd: How do you think you're going to be in power without understanding the political and capitalist power structures in place there? How do you think you're going to get any civic activism done seriously without negotiating or battling these interests. I think you're wrongly dismissing it as general information. The things I sometimes read are not general by any stretch of the imagination, believe me.
Madhav: I like being deluded. Just don't let Zinn change your day even when others are begging for attention. Look at immediate things, man. Look more at things to DO.
Madhav: John makes his own way. Always.
Sidd: Well, we'll see about that! I won't be unhappy to see you succeed. I'm not letting Zinn get me on my knees and cry, even though that would not be entirely out of place. Look man, I know my personal interests lay immediately ahead of me and I wouldn't even have maneuvered the turnaround I have, if I had been foolish about it. My point is, there's indeed a thin line between being ignorant and being overwhelmed. If you are the latter, you at least have the chance to recoil and contribute usefully, but if you're ignorant by choice, you'll lose your intellectual capacity and moral will to ever come back from being another tool in the system.
Madhav: You think I'm ignorant? You also think there are two states to be in - Ignorant and overwhelmed. That's very naive in my opinion. As far as being a tool in the system is concerned, you should look at what we make of ourselves, not what they make of us.
Sidd: I don't think you're ignorant, I find fault with your argument that being concerned with the national premises of some of the most tirelessly researched intellectuals is useless. Well, sadly, a lot of truths one might have been ignorant about are overwhelming when one finds them. Chomsky's writings on US foreign policy being an absolute case in point. Being overwhelmed is a matter of managing opinions, man. You're also being defensive about the tool comment, I don't see why you should. Though working at Citi might be, I suspect, one of the least morally appetizing jobs to do, you made superb personal strides against it, and you should know by now, that I think so.
Sidd: I never said that being ignorant and overwhelmed are the two states we can be in. What I mean is that where certain below the surface information is concerned, the choice one often faces is to really scratch the surface, forget Google News and CNN while doing so, or just stay put without taking any of that trouble. If you do look for this information, it is often shocking and overwhelming to the general public, which IS the reason such news is underplayed.
Sidd: For e.g. someone in the UK attempted a citizen's arrest of John Bolton recently while he was in Wales, on the basis of a full list/motion he had written up, citing him responsible for high crimes, disrupting peace and making the case in the UN for the invasion of a sovereign country on no legal grounds. The person who attempted the arrest said he did so, albeit unsuccessfully, to remind people about the biggest war crime of the 21st century, that has, in five years, become all but forgotten or passed over. The information I took from that is that citizen's arrest is indeed a constitutional provision in the UK and maybe in India too, and under what circumstances it might be. I also took a profound feeling of satisfaction at the idea of the fear that moustached lying asshole must have felt when it seemed like the only things stopping him from being arrested were two (300 lb gorillas) security guards.
Madhav: I guess with time, you'll see what it is to pick your battles. And outrage is good. Just make sure it's your own.
Sidd: Man, in this world, there is no need to borrow any ire, indignation, outrage or umbrage.
[a few hours later]
Sidd: You said pick your battles. Serious question - What exactly are your battles against?
Madhav: My angst comes from my intestines. It lives there. I do what I can but loud idle chatter is my biggest achievement.
Sidd: The least corporate-subservient, least corporate-reliant, least corporate-benumbed, least socially indifferent, most literate, most panicked lot of us that seek answers to the big questions in facts and ground realities are often conveniently labeled far-left or far-left-liberal or radical-liberal, when we scream upon finding the answers. Those of us who can't sleep at night after reading Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn or even just comfortably tune out. Those of us who can't conveniently dismiss the hard realities and harder solutions tirelessly researched and evinced by the likes of Ralph Nader and Michael Moore.
Madhav: Zinn, Chomsky and Nader have well defined causes. Most of them spurred on my personal experiences.
Sidd: Yes. And they're always either glossed over as scholars, or berated, in Nader's case, as some sort of spoiler or perennial wolf-crier.
Madhav: I'm just asking you what you're outraged about. Where does that stem from?
Sidd: Tell me how much bearing, if at all, their work has on public policy. And how much representation, if any, they have in the mainstream media.
Madhav: What media? What issues? Which country? Why are you this pained by it? What causes are naturally closer to you? Are these?
Sidd: YES, YES, YES. As an Indian, American foreign policy has immense bearing on me. As a member of a more imperfect democracy than theirs, the systematic dismantling of US public dissent and the neo-liberalization and corporatization of American power is of immense concern to me.
Madhav: That would be of academic interest. What action is that going to bring?
Sidd: Why academic, man? How delineated are cross-national domestic policies these days? Dow chemicals, Citibank, McDonalds, Nike, Exxonmobil and Shell operate in almost every country on earth, so why shouldn't I be concerned? I resent the idea of it being of mere academic interest to me. I think certain human rights, and consequently, laws, are of universal concern to everyone everywhere.
Madhav: What can you do? Is my question. You have to get to core influences and understand your place. Otherwise it is just pointless romance. A long distance relationship with a girl who couldn't care less. Always ends badly.
Sidd: That's a flawed analogy. Here's how I see it - if their corporations are feeding my kids feces - Hollywood, McDonalds, Coke, I had bloody well be concerned about what's happening there and how. I also believe that knowledge empowers you in ways you cannot estimate yet. A keen understanding about American constitution (or rights in UK) will empower me here in India, a less transparent, more noisy scenario. Think of it conversely as well - if pockets of informed resistance hadn't protested their own foreign policy, from out there in US soil, we might all be in US outposts by now. It matters, immensely, for a literate person. I don't feel disenfranchised that I can't vote in the US, I feel enlightened knowing that some day, I might be able to use similar premises to hold my authority figures' feet to the fire.
Madhav: Yeah. While you do that, I'll be in power. So it'll work out well. You're talking about a general understanding. I'm talking about using it.
Sidd: How do you think you're going to be in power without understanding the political and capitalist power structures in place there? How do you think you're going to get any civic activism done seriously without negotiating or battling these interests. I think you're wrongly dismissing it as general information. The things I sometimes read are not general by any stretch of the imagination, believe me.
Madhav: I like being deluded. Just don't let Zinn change your day even when others are begging for attention. Look at immediate things, man. Look more at things to DO.
Madhav: John makes his own way. Always.
Sidd: Well, we'll see about that! I won't be unhappy to see you succeed. I'm not letting Zinn get me on my knees and cry, even though that would not be entirely out of place. Look man, I know my personal interests lay immediately ahead of me and I wouldn't even have maneuvered the turnaround I have, if I had been foolish about it. My point is, there's indeed a thin line between being ignorant and being overwhelmed. If you are the latter, you at least have the chance to recoil and contribute usefully, but if you're ignorant by choice, you'll lose your intellectual capacity and moral will to ever come back from being another tool in the system.
Madhav: You think I'm ignorant? You also think there are two states to be in - Ignorant and overwhelmed. That's very naive in my opinion. As far as being a tool in the system is concerned, you should look at what we make of ourselves, not what they make of us.
Sidd: I don't think you're ignorant, I find fault with your argument that being concerned with the national premises of some of the most tirelessly researched intellectuals is useless. Well, sadly, a lot of truths one might have been ignorant about are overwhelming when one finds them. Chomsky's writings on US foreign policy being an absolute case in point. Being overwhelmed is a matter of managing opinions, man. You're also being defensive about the tool comment, I don't see why you should. Though working at Citi might be, I suspect, one of the least morally appetizing jobs to do, you made superb personal strides against it, and you should know by now, that I think so.
Sidd: I never said that being ignorant and overwhelmed are the two states we can be in. What I mean is that where certain below the surface information is concerned, the choice one often faces is to really scratch the surface, forget Google News and CNN while doing so, or just stay put without taking any of that trouble. If you do look for this information, it is often shocking and overwhelming to the general public, which IS the reason such news is underplayed.
Sidd: For e.g. someone in the UK attempted a citizen's arrest of John Bolton recently while he was in Wales, on the basis of a full list/motion he had written up, citing him responsible for high crimes, disrupting peace and making the case in the UN for the invasion of a sovereign country on no legal grounds. The person who attempted the arrest said he did so, albeit unsuccessfully, to remind people about the biggest war crime of the 21st century, that has, in five years, become all but forgotten or passed over. The information I took from that is that citizen's arrest is indeed a constitutional provision in the UK and maybe in India too, and under what circumstances it might be. I also took a profound feeling of satisfaction at the idea of the fear that moustached lying asshole must have felt when it seemed like the only things stopping him from being arrested were two (300 lb gorillas) security guards.
Madhav: I guess with time, you'll see what it is to pick your battles. And outrage is good. Just make sure it's your own.
Sidd: Man, in this world, there is no need to borrow any ire, indignation, outrage or umbrage.
[a few hours later]
Sidd: You said pick your battles. Serious question - What exactly are your battles against?
Madhav: My angst comes from my intestines. It lives there. I do what I can but loud idle chatter is my biggest achievement.
Monday, June 30, 2008
How to work a grief-racked mind back into functional life
In the last two years, my mind has experienced loss in previously uninitiated ways. I've come to accept perpetual loss as the only reality in my life. I lost my mental stability. I lost a sense of personal ambition that I had reinstated by maneuvering an incredible academic turnaround. All of it. I lost two, three people who meant the world to me. Real, good people. When they left, they didn't leave holes I could fill with others. My experiences with them are now barely believable memories. Memories that I can't seem to touch or draw anything from. Especially Kay, who, by talking to, thinking about, and sometimes thinking for, I had so internalized into my life that when I lost her, I even lost my power of catharsis about the loss.
I moved on. I reconstructed my life, very imperfectly but did nevertheless so. Now, it doesn't really resemble what broke, but that's not a useful objective.
While being distantly conscious of it, I worked myself back into my academic trap, set in the far past, an equation which I had recklessly purged myself from a year back. I was sick of this life here, and I had deliberately disconnected myself from every concern to do with Singapore, NTU and my obligations from the six previous long years. I had summarily refused to remain at knife point anymore.
So in reconstruction, I distastefully retook the baffling academic subjects that, more than ever, seemed to not have anything to do with reality. I focused where I had to, and pushing, pulling, procrastinating, I prepared for my examinations and did just well enough in them. It was not a heroic feat. Admittedly, it took less from me this time than it had on previous occasions because I was now familiar and numb to the whole drab method. It was utterly joyless, which might have something to do with why I'm still waiting to be jubilant about successfully passing them.
I find myself now, having graduated, and basically with absolutely nothing to do, doing nothing. There is the task of finding a job and a source of income, an urgent task that in the first few weeks, scared me witless and now just regularly nags me. Going with it are these considerations of finding a job - to my liking, a job I can sustain my mind in, and less obligatorily, thinking about my future and where I personally want to be.
Noticeably, I am more agitated about the optional concerns - what I want to make of my education so far, what I want to pursue now and how I can not waste any more time and resources before doing so. (Madhav thought my situation as analogous to being trapped under a rock for 6 years and then scurrying around chaotically when suddenly freed.)
I hesitate from taking a completely chalked out, rigidly structured approach to this. At this moment, I don't have even a loosely structured one. I don't know anybody else who thinks about the subjects I think I'm 'interested' in, with an equal or greater degree of personal attachment. "Law", and my loosely defined niche of it (elaborated later).
I have issues with thinking of them as "interests". I'm sick and tired of this universally regenerated, interest-career-hobby cycle of education and life that doesn't reconcile personal welfare with personal philosophy. I myself have trouble separating career and financial concerns from the process of charting out a course for myself. It makes me sick. I don't care if I make no money out of it, but I can't afford not to. At this point, I am 60,000 S$ in student loan debt and every minute bit of financial news alarms me. It's also not easy when I am in the hideous financial shape I am. I wouldn't survive if it weren't for Dionne's help. I can count on my fingers, the number of times I have had to use my wallet in the last 2-3 months.
The only distinction I am trying to make is between completely liberating myself from this organized system - studying law, constitution, governments' responsibility to the public, private and corporate accountability to the public, economics, individual liberties necessary to sustain democracy and the complex mechanism of private citizenry historically affecting larger society - and losing out on the theory, vast amounts of research and history already on record - or serving and learning within the system, while aware of its nature to insulate its scholars from real-world concerns and distract its practitioners with personal ambition at the expense of their moral responsibility. This is a decision I need to make as soon as possible and I am already inclined to the second - to study (work) within the academic system.
Because working outside of the academic system would involve the additional burden of having forever to rely on a "main" job - the most favourable scenario being teaching - and having to live the rest of my life with this single, piss of a degree in mechanical engineering.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Why this changes *everything*
I have news!
I found out last night that I have cleared all the subjects I took in the past semester and I've graduated. Bachelor of Mechanical Fucking Engineering. Here it is. It took me 6.5 bloody academic years. In three weeks, it will be 7 years to the day since I first left my home to pursue an engineering course in Singapore.
Please allow me to mark this moment with an attempt at catharsis. I really need to get it out. There is too much to say about all this, and although it may not all interest you, read on. Please indulge me, for this email is only addressed to close friends, people who already do know about my 'situation' to some extent, and who might have the patience to let me yap about it, one last time.
My Degree Audit <see attached> (chronology with the results of every academic semester from July 2001) reads like a fucking train wreck that married a cemetry. Or something worse. The rationale behind it is just illegible and the inconsistency baffling (two Final Year Projects? two Internships? This is surely unprecedented in my university). The only thing you might take away from it is that nobody in their right mind could merit me as being a good engineering student. It's baffling even to me. I can barely tie it together with one mind, and maybe hence this email.
Doing a 4-year-course over 6.5 years is, I know, in all practical considerations:
- needlessly stretching it, prolonging the agony (if found agonizing) and not applying a reasonably smart mind in the right ways that should have made graduation smoother and way sooner,
- financially unwise because my study loans have now accumulated to over 1.5 times what they could have been if I had finished in 4 years.
- potentially financially devastating, living as a student for nearly seven years (tick)
- just not very smart, overall, even in an unhelpful situation like mine.
Knowing any of this didn't help, my friends. It might have, in my younger university years, but wisdom is wasted on the old. I didn't know then, and it didn't help 'knowing' over the last year.
But here's my point - I don't care now. I'm far too relieved that I even got here, far too relieved.
This changes everything.
The last year was painful. Absolutely chaotic. Financially, just Hell. The worst part is virtually all of it could be described as tired lessons I was being served, for not graduating in April 2007 (see below).
I'm very grateful to those who have cared for me, even if they couldn't fully empathise for me, over the last year. Your kindness has paid off. I'm alive now, and I find I'm around in a situation that calls for incommunicable amounts of celebration.
This changes everything.
For the first time, this asks me to stop thinking of myself as a man who can't take care of myself. As someone who has permanently lost his personal security while in pursuit of the more egalitarian fulfillment. I know now that it is not so. This allows me to be a man who can be secure and take care of himself. I will never forget this. I will never forget how today makes me think of myself.
I also know that, after this email, I can take all the anger and helplessness and pain and years of unbearable suffering, in a situation that felt like a disease that inflicted me, and put it somewhere else. Some place wiser, I hope.
OK. Other than that, here goes:
I don't ever have to come back to this fucking university again. Why so bad? It's a cold, lifeless, 'learning environment' that stifles any real learning, that rewards students less on merit and more on being student.
Raising hands and asking questions in class: no. Highlighting exam portions in school-supplied, school-printed lecture notes: yes. Teachers who assume authority and force in their classes: no. Teachers who mumble and hiss their way through lessons: yes. Strong study evaluation system: no. Grading largely on all-important, patterned, formulaic, substance-less examinations: yes.
You must think I'm a spoilt brat. But I'm from fucking India, Central Board of Secondary Education. Millions of students, so much competition, so many other than you at each fucking rank and level that whether you're arrogant or humble as a student is itself of no consequence at all. Before I came here, I was trained to think, to question and find out for myself. I had learnt by raising hands in class. I had learnt by making vulgar doodles in class and calling my less-accomplished teachers whores behind their backs, while all along, the academics just went on, whether I cared or not. Consider this environmental mismatch with what became, in university, an utter lack of ambition for the subjects on my part, and you'll gain some perspective on why this university is overall, a fucking yawn to me.
I don't remotely care about Engineering. Fuck Engineering. I've completed this degree simply to be prudent. My immigration records, my finances, my family, my self-esteem - all of these relied on my completing this course to earn this piece of fucking paper.
a footnote to the lyric of Dream City once said:
"This is my most autobiographical lyric yet, written in 2005. I could subtext each and every line of the lyric. The dream city in here is Singapore. I feel like I was betrayed and sold out to this place for a few thousand dollars: I was (with adult guarantors from my family), signed to giant study loans in Singapore dollars, to pursue an Engineering course in NTU Singapore, in June 2001, at 17 years and 2 months of age. There came a point of time in my life – at 19 – when I wanted to be set free of this but was held back (in a cruel and undeserved way), in this "ridiculous, utilitarian, socialist dream", ransom to the study loan debt (combined with the loss of a visa for a nation I did not care to remain in but which had an infinitely stronger currency than the Indian rupee with my study loan debts being in SGD, payable in INR). It was a situation I did not deserve to be in, at 19 because I had actually applied to get a semester's leave of absence so I could take drum lessons at home (and eventually, not return), but instead, got expelled from the university thanks to a stupid grading system and stuck with huge bills I couldn't tell anyone in my family or do anything about. So I secretly appealed, came back, passed subjects I did not want to be studying, continuing a course I did not want to pursue. I've never truly regained my equilibrium since."
This is roughly what happened in the first 3 years of my studying here. And then the next two. Starting June 2001 and until January 2005, when I quit my first Internship after three unbearable weeks in a menial fucking white collar job in the HSE department of Cooper Cameron, oil drilling equipment manufacturers.
The details are tedious to write and surely, to read. I'll let them be.
What happened then?
I was supposed to graduate in November 2006 - I had set myself up after a fantastic semester in Jan - May 2006, when I hurt and slaved and cleared 8 terrible subjects (and another in the summer) with decent grades and pushed my first Final Year Project along just enough to cap the whole course in November 06.
Then there was that personal tragedy - maybe that's too pompous a word, but it just about captures what happened to me in October-November 2006. I got nothing done. I barely pulled myself together and tried to finish it again in April 2007. But couldn't. Didn't. Some asshole professor gave me hell so I let the whole thing drop. Over one night. I sat out of every single exam in April 2007, and neglected my final year project completely. I gave up then. Truly. This thing was all but buried. [My parents think I graduated then. Today, I can finally make our stories intersect again.]
This whole fucking unbelievably uphill task, to merely salvage my life/career which had at the end of my high school been incredibly promising to everyone around me, ended momentarily in May 2007. I never wanted to return to it again. I was going to leave Singapore, once and for all. I stayed back for some reasons, that in retrospect seem flimsy. And in order to stay, I had to continue being a student. I had to find a job to support myself, which I did, and kept (and lost a few months on that one August evening, along with my mental equilibrium).
Until October 2007, I still wasn't sure if I would indeed finish this degree. It has really been that hard, folks. Call me whatever you want for this. I will probably not deny it. Except it was never easy. It has never been easy. It never felt easy when I surveyed it, and it was not, every time I gave it a try. And every time I considered finishing it, or not, it also underlined this other big question of what the fuck I was still doing in Singapore.
That I have finished this now, is unbelievable. All these years, I was never fully convinced that I would get here. So that is what it means to me. This is not a bachelor's fucking degree for its own sake.
There's a Ministry of Education bond that this involves, meaning that I will have to stay and work in Singapore for the next three years, but as at this moment, I don't mind. The worst is really over, and it's my duty to try to live a somewhat fulfilling life in this city, which I think is possible, in spite of it.
Thank you for reading.
DEGREE AUDIT
| Office of Academic Services |
| Name SIDDESH MUKUNDAN Sex M |
AU Requirements
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| Legend: | ||
| GER-PE - General Education Requirement Prescribed Electives | 2nd Spec-PE - Second Specialisation Prescribed Electives | |
| BM - Business & Management | AHSS - Art, Humanities and Social Sciences | STS - Science, Technology & Society |
Examination Results
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