Life in an IIT | How a call at a pani puri stall changed this Bihar student’s life forever

The afternoon my mentor called, I was at a pani puri stall in Darbhanga. The answer keys had been released days earlier, but I had not bothered to check them. It was a free afternoon, and I was making the most of it. My phone rang.

My mentor had asked for my details earlier to calculate my score while I was busy not thinking about it, and now he had the number. I picked it up. He said: “Ban gaye tum IITian (You have become an IITian).” That is how I found out I was going to IIT Guwahati.

Standing at a roadside stall in the city I have always considered home, eating pani puri, entirely unprepared for that particular phone call. My father is in the police service, and my mother is a homemaker. I did my schooling at an English-medium school, which was the only ICSE school in the entire Darbhanga and Madhubani region.

Looking back, I am glad I had that foundation; it prepared me in ways I did not fully appreciate at the time. What I miss most about home is not the place itself but the people in it. There are six of us, a friend group held together for longer than I can clearly remember, and since coming to college, their company is what I have missed most.

The memories we made together in Darbhanga are the kind that do not need photographs to stay vivid. I prepared for JEE Main and Advanced in Patna, at a coaching institute, Super 100. The two years I spent there were, in hindsight, one of the most important phases of my life, not because of the syllabus, but because I learned how to stay away from my parents and take care of myself.

I made good friends. I learned to talk to people my own age without retreating into my shell. I arrived a shy boy from Darbhanga and left considerably less so. Class 11 was close to perfect. I studied well, slept well, stayed ahead of the syllabus, and scored decently in tests.

Class 12 changed that. My faculty changed, and I could not quite sync with the new teachers. Backlogs began piling up, my confidence dropped, and so did my marks. There were health issues for a stretch too. But everything that happened in that year made me a stronger person, and I have found I genuinely do not want to complain about it.

If I had to describe what JEE preparation actually is, I would say it is running a marathon. The exam itself is not the hard part; staying consistent every single day of preparation is. There are good days and bad days. There are days when you feel you might crack IIT Bombay CSE, and days when everything feels like it is falling apart.

You have to learn to put both kinds of days aside and focus on the one thing that actually matters: showing up. I secured AIR 7,457 in JEE Main and AIR 3,863 in JEE Advanced. My rank was not going to get me CSE (Computer Science and Engineering) in the top IITs, and I knew that.

So, I asked myself a simple question: if not CSE, then what genuinely interests me? Mathematics was never my strongest subject. Electricity had haunted me throughout JEE preparation. That left Mechanical Engineering, something that felt to me like real engineering, the kind where you can see and touch and understand what you are working on.

I focused mainly on Mechanical during JoSAA counselling, though I filled other branches too based on what my mentors advised. I am also not going to pretend I am driven by some lifelong passion for machines. To be honest, I am not the kind of person who simply loves studying.

I study because I do not think I have anything else that is extraordinary about me, and by some grace, I happen to be good at it. July 31, 2023, was my first day at IIT Guwahati. The moment I saw the main entrance, I felt something settle warmly inside me.

It was a genuinely good day, if we ignore the weather, which was absolutely and thoroughly humid in the way that only Guwahati can be in the monsoon. It was not my first time away from home; two years in Patna had taken care of that, so homesickness was not the adjustment I had to make.

What was new was the scale of everything around me. For the first time, I was meeting people from so many different languages, cultures, and backgrounds, all at once. My roommate, on the other hand, was stepping out of his home for the very first time.

You could see it on his parents’ faces when they dropped him off, that particular mix of pride and worry that no parent quite manages to hide. He and I got along almost immediately, and today he is one of my closest friends on campus.

I was quite nervous in those early weeks and held myself back from diving into clubs and activities. But I was very fortunate when it came to friendships. The people I became close to during my first semester are still my closest friends today.

There are eight of us in the core group, and with them I can talk about anything, from salaries to satire, as I tend to describe it. I genuinely could not have asked for more in that part of college life. As time passed, I realised I needed to push myself beyond what felt comfortable.

The first club I joined was the Athletics Club, and it has felt like a family ever since. I also became part of LitSoc (Literature Society), the Automobile Club, and TEDxIITGuwahati, but if I had to name the two that truly shaped the person I have become here, it would be the Athletics Club and TEDx without hesitation.

The Athletics Club is also where I confronted something I had not expected: I had no background in sprinting. None at all. But the people there helped me grow steadily through their support and encouragement, and in 2024 I travelled to Indore to represent IIT Guwahati in the Inter-IIT Sports Meet.

I competed in two relay races. I did not win a medal, but I left heavily inspired by the people I ran alongside, and by the people I watched from the sidelines. In my very first semester, in a mathematics course, I received the first zero of my life.