What kota taught me

Some of the life lessons which I was taught by the coaching junction kota .

Yes . You read it right. The coaching capital of India. Spent two years there. Studied in one of the finest engineering coachings in Kota or rather in India itself . Yes , I didn’t make it to the IITs , I managed only a rank of 11871 in AIEEE . Yet, I am saying that Kota taught me a lot. Period .

When I decided to go to Kota. I was a kid, in terms of age, looks , mental capabilities , everything. My decision to go to Kota was fuelled not by a desire to excel  there but rather to break away from the chains which I felt bound me to my home, by a desire to become what I called independent in terms of my decisions, my lifestyle, my friend choices, in fact almost everything . And here is the first lesson that Kota taught me - if you do a task with the wrong reasons , then be sure that you’ll get all the wrong results .

Life in my hometown Allahabad had been relatively easy for me till class 10. My learning strategies though ridiculed innumerable times were had proven to be sufficient to secure for me top ranks in almost all the classes that I had been(the only classes in which I did not secure the top ranks were the ones in which I had broken some body part of mine ). But in kota where almost every other kid was a top ranker I learnt another lesson ,as soon as I secured a rank of 1999 in a test that you either keep your learning strategies updated or you better be ready to get screwed .

When I was in Allahabad I had a habit. A stupid habit, that of being a loner and thinking that whatever you learn you learn on your own and if you can’t learn it on your own then you can never learn it . Lesson no. 3 that kota taught me was that this view which I held was one of the most skewed views of reality that I could have had held . If you are willing to learn then your peers , your seniors and even your juniors can teach you many things ranging from better learning strategies , problem solving strategies to how to better apply newton’s laws of motion . It all depends on your willingness to learn .

At home being the younger sibling I had been the apple of my parents’ eyes . Hence everything from even the slightest of illnesses of mine to demands regarding my food were immediately attended to. Living alone in kota I  was soon given the lesson that you either learn to stand up on your own feet or you’ll crawl for your entire life , that you either learn to adjust fast or you can frown and sulk to your heart’s content and no one will give a damn .

At home I had my mum, who was always there to get behind me whenever I would get behind in studies . In kota however things were different. No mum .So I could put off studies in favour of other more pleasurable activities like playing fifa in cyber café over LAN , gossiping with friends , roaming in the streets .Considering I could easily lie to my parents about my day , to myself about catching up by saying that I have always been good at studies and so it won’t be much of a bother to catch up . After all I only had to sit down with enough concentration and focus and bingo ! everything would be done . That is when kota decided to teach me the next lesson .  I achieved a rank of 3899 as compared to that of 567 in the previous test and in a manner of speaking was told by kota never to take things for granted , to always work on my skills  ,to keep on polishing them , to keep my work above everything else  or otherwise I will surely find myself in the dumps .

When I was in Allahabad , in terms of social networking sites we had orkut and Hi5 only  , they had user unfriendly interfaces , were very sparsely populated and the most important thing was that I did not had an internet connection at my home and there is only a limit up to which a foodie like me could spend his pocket money for internet usage in the cyber cafes . That all changed in kota . The finance department came under my control, I got a new phone , gps packs became cheaper, facebook became the hippest social networking site in town, population explosion occurred on facebook and soon I found myself bitten by the bug of social networking . Soon , I found myself facebooking in class , in cyber café , in my room . Soon , my studies were left on their own , to care for themselves and wham I find kota ready to teach me another lesson . And this time in style . By making me a total champu in trigonometry  lessons  and teaching me that social networking sites can divert my attention from my troubles for a little while but if I want my troubles to actually end I should stay away from it or else it will prove to be a cause of far worse troubles.

These are the most important lessons that kota did teach me . It taught me a whole lot of other lessons too but I think this blog post will become too long if I sit down to write about each and every lesson that kota taught me  . But I’ll have to say this before I sign off . My academic lessons could have been probably learnt by me better in Allahabad but the lessons which kota taught me , well I would never have been to learn them anyplace else and with  .