this is a bit autobiographical, or to put it in less fancy terms, a noodle-blog. of course, the blame for all this goes to the manliest mannion around and his little essay filled with angel dust and other magic, so he gets to take the blame (even for my crappy writing) :)
i was never a straight-A student. i could have been(a contender too, while i’m at it) if i had put in the effort, but i never saw the reason to do so. getting along at 80% with minimum effort meant more time for me to spend dreaming, or with friends, or dreaming with friends, or something along those generally unproductive lines. i had a lot of fun. let it never be said that i hated school or the teachers there. i always went, and went happily. i just couldn’t bring myself to scramble for the top spot. the teachers at my various schools would always put in my annual reports the phrase ‘can do better’. my mom, being mom, tended to take that point as an excuse to indulge in excessive goading, along with the occasional threat that i would end up as one of many unsavoury things such as waiter/busboy,bus conductor/ticket inspector or somewhere in that perceived social stratum. but even that never really motivated me to actually do better. i could never get into the academically ultra-competitive mode that urban high school education in india generally grinds into you, mostly because i didn’t see a purpose to it*.
fast forward a few years and today i find out that i top-scored in the first year examinations for the BFA. it does not elicit from me a whoopee!! response, nor do i feel like nit-picking at the flaws in my performance(how could i, really?) but it does give me a great deal of reassurance that doing something that i actually enjoy can work out. a highly unusual feeling. all the hours spent reading about photographers, equipment, styles, events, not to mention the endless hours behind the cameras and in darkrooms do not drain me of my enthusiasm to keep doing it. if this is effort, then there’s heaps more where that came from.
† more parts will spew forth if i ever get around to clarifying the many words i am now accumulating in the drafts, answering such questions as: what was THAT part? from the time you were fast-forwarding. oh, you haven’t read the post yet? do so, and come back to these notes later!
*of course it had it’s purpose, and that was to make you an engineer whether you liked it or not… most of the 100-odd kids that graduated with me, including those that pursued the holy-crap-that-stuff-is-hard biology stream are now engineering graduates working for some software company or the other,or in the states, making quite decent salaries but of course unsatisfied and thinking this has something to do with their level of pay. none of them hopefully read this. i don’t want any competition.
doop HQ 