11 May 2022: As I start writing this—farewells have been given, write-up season is over, and most people have written (and messed up) their first compre of the semester. Hence, as characteristic of my time here at BITS, I have left attempting this last assignment of mine as well for the very last moment. PsentiSpeaks are typically used by the graduating batch to offer some advice to their juniors based on the time that they have spent on campus. I shall be thoroughly eschewing such notions, lest some poor junior makes the folly of actually following the path that I would be laying down for them. I would, instead, be using this space to talk about the year that has gone by.

Being a dualite is a hard job, especially so in your fourth year. You spend your entire campus life in the shadow of your single-degree peers. You’re with them, yet you’re always trying to catch up as they move away from campus towards their professional lives, while your own life is stuck back here in stasis. You neither truly belong to your own batch, nor to your junior one. You’re stuck in this weird limbo in between—having to care about mundane issues like studying for compres while people around you are trying to make the most of their last few days on campus. 

However, irrespective of the duration of your studies here at BITS, it is the goodbyes that hit you the hardest. You say goodbye to the people you have spent every waking moment of the past four years with (physically in the usual scenario, virtually for us)—making promises of keeping in touch come what may. In the back of your mind, however, a niggling doubt persists. Similar promises had been made back on the last day of school, to varying degrees of success. Armed by reassurances that it is in college that life-long friendships are made, you hope that the bonds made here would prove to be stronger than the ones made erstwhile. Yet the realist in you has made peace with the inevitability of some friends drifting away as time moves on. 

16 May 2022: The moment you are done receiving your farewells, it feels as if a psenti-switch, about whose existence you were hitherto unaware, has been turned on. Campus, the place you had been calling home for the past four years, suddenly starts feeling alien. It feels as if you are not supposed to be on campus anymore—as if you are living out your last few days here on borrowed time. 

Disappointed over being forced to spend more than a year of their college lives back at home due to the pandemic, many batchies of mine had come back armed with psenti-sem bucket lists to try and make the most of the limited time they have on campus before they graduate. Sneaking into Shivganga, trying to get to the top of the clocktower—you know how these lists usually go. And yet as I wile away my time on these farewell-induced nostalgia trips, I think about the small, seemingly insignificant, moments more than these thought-out, big-ticket campus experiences. Spending hours and hours at some redi drinking tea with some wingies, impromptu Pizzeria drinking plans, going to ANC thinking you’ll leave in half an hour to study for an 8 AM tut only to leave three hours later. It is the trivial, everyday moments—just being able to spend time together with some friends without an iota of real responsibility over any of our shoulders—that is what I am going to miss the most as I leave these hallowed streets.

Over the past four years, there is much that BITS has given me that I am grateful for. It has provided me with an environment in which I could grow freely as a person with no one having any sort of expectations from me. While I am no closer to figuring out what I want to do in life now than I was back in my 1-1, it has at least narrowed the field down by helping me discern what I definitely do not want to do. But above all, it has given me an incredible set of friends that truly define campus life for me, more so than anything else. While I won’t be able to personally name all of you here (as some amongst you have expressed a desire for), please know that I am truly thankful for all the time that I got to spend with the bunch of you, however limited that might have been because of the lockdown. 

I have lived, laughed, and loved at BITS. Sadly, now it’s time to leave.

Signing off,

Sabhya Kapur

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