This post serves an Epilogue for the series on ‘Musings on a BITSian Life‘.

There is a time and opportunity cost attached to everything. Everything. This is probably one of the most humbling realizations of adulthood. Its probably why people came up with the proverb: “Youth is Wasted on the Young”. (Not sure why more young people are not doing something to change this, well anyway).

The 20s can be an incredible time of one’s life. Youth has a definition in terms of age. I would like to add to that definition. Youth is when your time belongs to you, that beyond certain basic things, you are answerable/accountable to almost no one. Think of the vast possibilities and freedoms such a state of mind brings. It so happens that in the current setup of our lives, mostly 20s is the age around which people find themselves to be in this state naturally. (Imagine those who never get this chance and those who never realize that they are experiencing it, bah)!

Having some inkling of this, I set out in my 20s with the goal to have a reasonably good idea as to where I stood on the Risk-Endurance graph I describe in Future of Work: An Individual Perspective. Even the dating world has a version of this goal paraphrased in its own language. It goes something like this: “Before an I Love You, there is an I”. Armed with these aphorisms, my 20s were filled with experiments. Filled with questions and zealous attempts to answer them. The world tested me and I tested the world. It was tiring, painful but very, very revealing.

I will go out on a limb and say that close to graduation, take a blank piece of paper. Sketch out the axes of the 2 graphs (1,2) I have described in Future of Work: An Individual Perspective and put a few dots on them (for yourself and the people important to you). You may get a graduation degree at the end of your time at BITS but that little piece of paper will be your own (real) graduation certificate.

In my last few days on BITS campus, I found myself once again at odds with some sections of the administration on a technicality. Most people I knew had said their goodbyes, packed up bags and left. I was determined to find a way out of the technicality however (because the alternative was not acceptable to me). In the searing desert heat of Pilani, I visited my room in the small breaks from that rebellious attempt to empty it out in time for final summer closure. On one of those days, a junior from the Athletics team I had captained a year ago gave me a hand-painted poster with this little couplet from my all time favourite poem:

Lives of great (wo)men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us 
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another, 
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main, 
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, 
Seeing, shall take heart again.

My particular circumstances at the time had rendered me pretty lonely and depressed and I was losing sight of the journey. (My favorite poem coming back to me in such an incredible way felt like a sign from the universe). So, I would like to thank her for making me realize that I was leaving footprints in the sands of time and that someone was noticing. 

I have argued at length about the increasing role of specialization in the future of work. And I began this epilogue with how everything has a time and opportunity cost. Given the nature of the competitive field I am in, it would have been far more beneficial professionally for me if I had spent the time instead writing some research paper to get published in a fancy AI/ML conference. That background processor was always running as I churned out some of this. 

However, I wanted to honor the sign the universe sent me on a cruelly hot summer afternoon in Pilani in 2012 and leave honest footprints in the sands of time. Brutally honest ones at that. I hope that this helps some forlorn and shipwrecked soul somewhere, someday, take heart again!