It’s been only six months since I joined a college in Delhi. The feeling was really inexplicable when I first stepped in the premises, both in terms of joy and nervousness. College is a place where we explore different diversities and enjoy the tastes of different cultures. That’s what I had thought about my life at college and I am living it.
It was July 17, 2018 when I first came to Delhi with a dream and a lot of expectations from my parents’ side and nervousness too. I had been admitted to Delhi University’s Ram Lal Anand College that locates itself in the university’s South Campus. From my childhood, I had loved to read and write. I got the course I had aimed for, English Honours, and that kept me moving against the tides.
The first day of my college life was very hectic, as well as brutal because I had left my comfort zone, my home and come away from the palace of hills, Kashmir. I had been asked multiple times why I left Kashmir. Leaving the paradise was never a borrowed idea, but completely my own, for the sake of literature.
I was completely new in the city. The crowd that encircled me in the college was of strangers. I did not know anyone of them except a boy who was also from Kashmir. There were different people with different ideas and I was a stranger among them carrying a smile on my face.
It took me nearly a month to understand the diversity at DU and to settle myself in that crowd. But with the passage of time, my anxiety slowly drifted away. The feeling of homesickness disappeared in the crowds of the college. In spite of everything, college gave me a space to understand different complexities of the country. Even I started questioning myself over certain opinions and stereotypes. It allowed me to unlearn the taboos that had occupied a space in my mind without the knowledge of real issues.
Then, step by step, I got to know people by conversing with them. I remember on the very first day of my college, when I was sitting in the class and everybody surrounding conversed in groups. In the meantime while I was observing everyone, a girl who sat behind me said, “Hi?” and I responded with, “Hello,” and the conversation started. This was my first interaction in the class. We introduced ourselves first and when I said that I was from Kashmir, they began preaching its beauty. Then, we explained our aims and goals and I remember how she said that she wanted to become a RJ. Finally, she had a piece of advice for me, “You have left your friends, family there. In order to settle in the crowd, you have to take the initiative of talking and making friends. It will not be done by someone but you have to do it yourself.” This was probably a bigger takeaway on my first day at college instead of the lectures by professors.
It was nice to meet new people every day from different courses and from different backgrounds. Whenever I would introduce myself as a ‘boy from Kashmir,’ there were different trails of opinions, even the biased ones that mainstream media broadcasts, that I would listen to humbly. I certainly want to write about the misinformation that media has created among the general masses about Kashmir. Some would describe beautiful landscapes of my place and some would describe only a minute side of the conflict. And I took both.
At first, it was really hard for me to go through all the hardships that an outsider faces, but I kept my pace with Delhi’s temperature and traffic. “In Delhi you are either the first or you are lost,” Ruskin Bond wrote once. So, I brace myself for upcoming struggles and to not get lost in the crowd.