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.
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