Who We Are
(On Courage, Impatience, and Hope)
By
Divyaansh Chhipa
TY B.Sc. Economics, Batch of 23-27
Estimated Reading Time – 8 minutes
Source: AI-generated
On Courage
Did you look back on the first time your dad dropped you off at school? I looked back and cried my eyes out. After that, for a good week, my face would have a huge smile all the way to school. Once I reached, and my father and I would get in the elevator, my face would turn red, and my throat would make noises that sounded like humans trying to communicate in the Paleolithic era. This phenomenon continued for a week, and for a week, I got to bunk classes simply because I mastered crying on cue. On Monday, I packed my bag, drank my Bournvita, ate my badaam, travelled, and bravely stepped into the elevator. My eyes, dry this time, caught my father by surprise. He knew, in that moment, that he’d lost his child to the world. He wiped his misty eyes to mourn the fact that he’d left me to the wolves (dropped me at school).
The talk of Engineering in an Indian household is not just a discipline; it is a ritual that all must go through. Conservative or not, prestige is what almost all families desire and welcome. A cousin, more gifted than most, picked up a ball one day, ran toward the stumps as if they’d betrayed him, and launched the ball in his hands as if letting go of all that weighed him down. It was love at first delivery. He went on to play for a long time, almost making it to the Indian Premier League. His body was in no way shackled, but his mind was tethered by his parents’ insistence on a Civil Engineering degree. A Four-year tier-3 college later, his spirit and the designs of his buildings both faltered. He watches all Team India and IPL matches religiously, as if he’d bet his life savings on them. Every time he calls me, he says “Divyaansh, Mai kuch ban sakta tha”, which loosely translates to “Divyaansh, I was almost something good”. If you have a heart, it is the right time for it to break.
I see courage as I see heat.
Thermal Expansion happens when you provide heat to a metal. As the temperature rises, the metal expands. As the temperature lowers, the metal contracts and shrivels.
I knew that I had to be brave to enter that elevator, and braver to exit it with a dry face. My brother knew that to have the kind of life that he wanted, he needed to have the courage to face years of conservative parenting and tradition. There are a thousand stories of courage, more grandiose, grueling, and ghastly. But you, my dear reader, are smart (I am hoping). People studying, and having studied statistics, will know how to extrapolate. Every day, I believe that your life will contract and expand based only on the amount of courage you have. You will ask God for a saviour who will hold you gentle as a sapling, only to be told you are the one who helps breathe life into others, you are the one whose roots will discover water, and you are the one within whom love rises like the sun. Open your history books. Asking never works, taking often has.
Show courage, let your life expand, hold yourself like a knife, and charge. Maybe you overcome your fear of school, or maybe you become a cricketer. Either way, you will never have to call me at 2 AM saying, “Divyaansh, I was almost something good”.
On Impatience
You have a flower in your hands. In terms of its wealth and inheritance, it has 5 petals. Am I moving too fast? It has almost been 4 years since I changed so radically that even my mother doesn’t recognise the son that she used to call lazy. I think rigid rules and discipline should govern my life, and my diet should be strict. Everything that I eat must be measured, and everything that I drink must be free of sugar. A petal is plucked; there are 4 petals left in your hands. I need to be rushing through life faster and faster, so that I can complete all of my responsibilities first, and then I get to do whatever I want as soon as possible. Let me give all of the exams too soon, learn all of the skills too fast, and enter all of the rooms that I am considered too young for. Let me outwork my enemies and my friends and my relatives and all the ivy kids and the ants and the bees and the winds and god and death and then myself. A petal is plucked; there are 3 petals left. I find her to be incredibly smart, funny, driven, and beautiful. Let me rush this dance, let me get through all of this romance as if it is a formality of life to be completed. As if the person on the other end isn’t a person, but a box to be tick-marked. Let me treat this human experience anything but humanely, and expect “outcomes” and “results” in what is supposed to be the most wonderful experience of my life. Let me put her through this mechanical process only for me to suffer a grueling loss. A petal is plucked; there are 2 petals left. Okay. Maybe it is now time to stop. It may be time to look at the wounds that I have endured and look at who I am, and not what I bring. Not what I offer, not my use case, not my skills, not my degree and pedigree, not the table that I apparently have to have a lot to bring to. I need to sit with the fact that when I was really needed, when I needed to have this mentality, I showed up and did the work. Besides, a heart that’s never been broken is one that has never lived. A petal is plucked; there is 1 petal left. There is a lot of life to live and a lot of memes to send. I have to climb the mountain, but I don’t have to be alone while doing it. The people who love me deserve to know I will be patient with their hearts, and more so with mine.
As the last petal is plucked, I focus on the garden. There is time, and I can breathe. You can too. Good Morning.
On Hope
(and its triviality)
People who love gambling have an abundance of hope. Someone I know (who’s an acquaintance at best, mind you) has a crush on a girl. Born in the same year, I thought that making conversation wouldn’t have been the toughest thing in the world for him. Both love to build themselves, through pictures on Instagram and through lifting weights at the mutual gym they frequent. This gentleman, instead of going the usual route of striking up conversations and asking the girl out, decides to vet her through unconventional means. Have you ever used a number plate for anything other than identifying your vehicle? This man, through his crush’s two-wheeler name plates, unearthed her parents’ names. From there, it wasn’t a herculean task to find them on Facebook and uncover more about their daughter through malicious means. Where there is a will, there is a way, I suppose. Though when he was finally rejected, the withdrawal of his infatuation was a sight to witness (4000 Beers Approximately). If this guy can have the audacity and hope to get her back, can you not hold on to your share of hope?
Stuck in the biggest rainstorm you have ever witnessed? Your umbrella has given up, your clothes are one with your skin, and there is nothing that you can see. Your palms and your fingers have become pruney, as they do when you used to spend a little too much time in the tiny bucket, bathing. Do you let the rainstorm subside, or do you yell at the clouds?
Refer to when I spoke about impatience, with others and with yourself. The storms have subsided, and your fingers are back to normal. But is your hair not wet, are your clothes not drenched, and are you not sneezing? In a crisis of hope, when you are in a thunderstorm, you will realize that just because the disasters have subsided, it will not mean that you must be ready to run a full marathon immediately after. It is okay to take time off to warm up, drink some tea, dry your hair, wash your muddy shoes, and put your phone in rice. Your expectations of yourself do not have to be at the same level as the rain that was pouring down.
There will always be the hand that doesn’t just hold yours, but absentmindedly traces circles on your skin. The kind of touch that says, “I see you without ever needing to”. There will always be books that mark the exact year you grew up, not because of their story but because of the person you were when you read them. There will always be Sushi to criticize (and make your friends eat wasabi on a dare), the Sun to wish Good Morning, the Moon to wish Good Night, the stars to just wish, clothes to try on, pets to pet, kids to pick up and throw away maybe idk. There will always be sticky notes curling at the corners, still clinging to walls like tiny flags of intention, reminders that at some point, you meant to become better. There will always be letters written not to be sent, just to prove you once felt something enough to write it down. There will always be ‘I love you’s said too casually and others said too late, and yet somehow both will matter. There will always be music that time-stamps a season of your life so precisely that ten years later, three chords can undo you. There will always be friends who reappear without context, just a comma where you left off. There will always be laughter that doesn’t sound like laughter at first, but relief, finally finding a way out. There will always be recipes that never taste the same because they depend on who’s in the kitchen with you, and coffee that cools because joy is delayed time.
There will always be proof of your softness in the most practical corners, the way you fold shirts like apologies, water plants after midnight, or keep every movie ticket because it feels like documenting hope. There will always be small, ordinary miracles reminding you that living well doesn’t end at grand gestures, but also extends to noticing that life keeps handing you reasons, quietly, to stay. Life will write better stories when you promise to read, intently. Hope can come from the weirdest of places.
Source: X (previously known as “Twitter”)
So, who are we?
After all of this, who are we to be? That is for you to decide. Everyone I have met has a notion about how the world is and how, as people, we are. For some, the world is a vexing puzzle, full of pain and misery, existing only in a cage. For others, it is sunshine and rainbows, laughter and happiness, peanut butter and jelly. For me, as I have grown up and seen the people around me, I know we must go through fear to be courageous, rush and uncertainty to be patient, and be deprived of all light to be hopeful.
What we make of everything we go through, is who we are.