It’s been two years since I graduated from IIT Madras. I don’t remember much of what was taught in the classroom. I do remember fragments of concepts and names of theories that I still throw around to impress people. I was good at the workshops. At the lathe machine, I fashioned a cylindrical lump of iron into a work of art. In the physics department I learned the mathematics of the motions of planets and molecules. I wrote a computer program to predict tsunamis; it’s still somewhere on my hard-drive. At the humanities department, I learned French and took to watching foreign films. I learned about industry and commerce and how to optimize everything from portfolios to the weight of a ship’s girder. All this i learned and forgot.
The most valuable learning in college was always outside the classroom – in the hostel, on the city streets, at the movies, in the cafes and on the beach. Here is a short list of all that I learned and I still remember:

1. There are many people in the world who are much smarter at everything than you are at anything.

2. Smartness and intelligence are overrated. There is no substitute for determination, effort and passion. We don’t live in an ideal world. We live in an unsympathetic one where only the strong win.

3. We practice science and engineering so that we may live. We live so that we may practice and enjoy the arts and share that joy with others.

4. College, they tell you, gives you the best years of your life. This, in my experience is not entirely true. As much as I enjoyed the college days, I don’t really want to go back there and do it all over again. Working and living alone in the city has given me experiences far more valuable and richer than anything I remember from college. Don’t they say the same thing about your childhood? Who really wants to be a child again and go through all the trials of growing up? There is no time like the present, because you can do something about it and the future is just around the corner.

5. Institutional education is overrated. In my hostel, I lived with hundreds of the sharpest minds in the country who knew about everything from writing compilers and designing digital circuits to genetic mutation and quantum chemistry. Most of them knew little about politics, philosophy, good cinema, classical music, art, photography, English usage, changing a fuse, tying a tie, swimming, riding motorcycles, talking to girls, dating, dancing, telling a good book from a bad one, playing a musical instrument, cooking, good table manners, dressing well, laboratory ethics and research! Well, you can only learn so much from your books.

6. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “When in doubt, don’t!”

7. Your grades don’t make you who you are, so don’t let them. I lost my schoolboy love for science in college because I could not cope with the demanding mathematics. I went into technology and finance after graduation. I now realize that I will never really be happy at any job, no matter how much it pays.

8. There is nothing that makes life as much fun as having good friends. I have learnt more from my friends in college than from all the lectures in the classrooms, and learnt things more valuable than engineering and mathematics.

9. It is more important to know where to look than to know everything. Besides, you can only remember so much. Learn concepts and stories, not equations and formulae. Google is your friend!

10. In retrospect, shit happens and things always get better!