[Written on 24th September, 2016]
I treat the Econ PhD program as a kind of baptism by fire that brings me back to what I always wanted to be. When I was a teenager among the many visions of the future I had was imagining what my teenage self would say to what I became in the future. For me at that time, becoming a scientist was the only path that made sense. It was pure, it was beautiful, and it was enduring. Running a company was never even a possibility - despite my father having been in the corporate world - and I wasn't even sure what was meant by engineering.
The knowledge about the IITs came some time in the 11th grade and I was resistant. It seemed a dumb thing to try for boring derivative stuff like engineering (I mean you were applying principles; yuck). For an entire year, I didn't study anything related to any exam. I was part of the NASA build-a-space-city challenge, a Delhi Government Vision 2020 contest, I was socializing (and miserably failing), and I was reading cool stuff about physics (not least of which was a paper by Seth Lloyd on Black Hole Computers).
Till that time my life had been based on some principles, long discarded. Number one, exams didn't matter. Don't get me wrong, I was always in the top five of any class but rarely, if ever, at number one. I loved giving exams because they were intensely exhilarating but I didn't believe in preparing for them. Number two, it didn't matter where you studied or what grades you had. I thought such superficiality had no place in modern society. I knew many friends who were studying very well but they were never impressive enough. And then there was this world of creative tinkerers who had reasonable grades but were doing awesomely.
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Today, I am finding it difficult to study. After starving myself for over 30 hours (no real reason) I went over to Chipotle to have a burrito. In the past few weeks the burritos have been a God send. I have always hated Mexican food but with home so far away the combination of "rajma" (Pinto beans) and "chawal" seems familiar and tasty. The burrito was heavy and unhealthy. I loved it.
I came back to my room to start revising Microecon except I looked at my bed and a voice told me it'd be better to study on the bed. You know where this goes. The blanket never seemed more comfortable and I barely remember dozing off to better process my burrito. The nap was comfortable but ended with an old school friend visiting me in a garden. I woke up at this point (again not sure of the reason) and realized my entire body felt like a mottled old cardboard carton. Every joint was paining. I turned left and right in bed trying to sort my body out. I got up eventually. The last thought I had before sleeping was the strangeness of life and how incredibly far fetched (but probably true) was the fact we were living in a glorious vacuum of indifference. It's like the discrete metric. If it's not about you it's equally far away but no point is really better than any other.
Having promised a friend I was going to study with him was just about enough to take me to the Social Sciences library. I walked the now familiar way there, with the St. John's Cathedral looming over my head as I turned left to look at all the fashionable people on the street (they look the same to me); I ascended towards my department. The library was closing early. So much for that.
I am now sitting in the Science and Engineering library. As I entered twenty minutes back I felt this feeling of familiarity and a recognition that I was acknowledged by the world where I truly belonged. Economics is a great discipline but it doesn't match the purity of the pure sciences (with due apologies to the engineers). It's a pretty decent compromise, doing a PhD in Economics.
