8. End of school life on a positive note

By this time, everyone in our group was clear about their careers, and which direction to move from then, but not me. I was the only odd-one out :P. Karan and Arsh took science with maths, Sagar and Disha took bio. Till then I didn’t know what to do exactly, so I chose the subject in which I had a bit interest and I thought was easiest, so I took arts. For the next two years, we met but mostly in school and that too only during recess as the classes were different. Hardly on any other occasion except the birthday parties, we could enjoy each-other’s company. We all wanted to be best in our respective fields, irrespective of our chosen stream.

So, the next two years passed and were actually quite uneventful. Karan and Sagar were by then really serious and they didn’t want to leave any opportunity as they knew that competition was going to be tougher as were moving ahead. Arsh had a bit interest in science and not at all in commerce and arts, and there was not any pre-requisite for joining IMA, so he also tried to get involved in scientific activities as he didn’t know that in his future life, whether he’ll get an opportunity to deal with them or not. Disha, had also been doing really well, though she was had some other plans (not competitions). She tried her best to make the use of last two years of her school life to the most. She greatly improved her speaking skills by taking part in speech competitions, extempore, which certainly helped her in handling any situation instantly, as a being a environmentalist, she had to meet various kind of people, answer their queries, conduct seminars etc. I also took part in these out of interest and one more reason was that, I was a bit annoyed by the fact that I always felt very nervous on stage, standing alone infront of the audience. I really trembled a lot as if someone would brake my head or kill me, if at all I didn’t speak well. So, I forced myself to all these, initially I was horrible ( not exactly, as I heard some claps after I spoke, although I knew those were only by my friends :P ). But over the period of those two years, I had developed the competence and won the third prize in my last speech in school ( now let me mention clearly, there were 12 people who participated, and coming 3^rd in that was indeed a big achievement for me :) ).

Those two years passed very quickly before we could realize. Soon 12^th board examinations arrived. I thought that we’ll be able to spend some more time together after that, but things went exactly opposite. Firstly, competitions came which kept science students busy, and secondly, after that, rush for admissions to colleges started. Everything just went too fast to notice and then time came, when we were leaving our home-place for the college. But that didn’t mean we were out of contact, we had cell-phones and were always in contact. We always used to share our incidents in college with each-other. So, here ended the most happy days of our school life when we were together.

I had chosen lightest stream ( or atleast I felt so), so had lots of free time in college. During this, I spent most of the time, trying to understand the political scenario of our country. I went to places , where hardly people went and tried to explore many places at the outskirts of the place where our college was located. I had a new friend, Sameer, who also took the political science, for the same reason (it being lightest of all other options). He was an adventurous person and had almost been to all those places before, and he was the one who took me there. Quite contradictory to a boy of our age, he was not at all interested in girls . He had his own world, of fun, and was really happy in that. He loved to go to new places, meet people and interact with them, actually his company also helped me a lot.

We went to various places, small villages, settlements, fields where farmers were working, slums and Govt. Schools etc. We tried to talk to the people over there, ask them about their life, facilities that they had, and about the problems they faced. Some of them were really co-operative while others just tried to ignore our questions.