A mindful conversation

For a long time now, I have always evaded paying a visit to my sister’s home by giving the weirdest and very unreasonable excuses, purely because of traffic chaos that I have had to endure to reach Nelamangala. But circumstances this year were totally different, thanks to the unprecedented times in the family and I am a regular visitor now. My nephew who is now a student of a residential school, 400 km away from home, is studying eleventh grade. He had come home for a week for holidays. This time, my sister had asked me to come home and specifically talk to him because ever since he has gone away from home, it has become hard for her to connect with him and that he is behaving weird. This was making her very anxious. 

I've seen my nephew growing in front of my eyes. From his super mischievous deeds like him painting my bike with a weird colored enamel paint, to both of us doing Harry Potter and other superhero quizzes online, we have always been on good jovial terms. We never discussed academia or had intellectual conversations together in the past. The conversation that I had with him this time was so different, that I took some time to come to terms with it. It made me see remarkable changes in his attitude and thought process, and I realized quite a few things have changed for good. This blogpost is all about the conversational epiphany that I experienced. 

The conversation started with me inquiring about his hostel life. He said he is enjoying this life. He started talking about how his life has changed. From waking up at leisure 8AM in the past to 530AM, doing the laundry himself; how the absence of luxuries of zomato and swiggy is controlling his hunger pangs; how he has been accustomed to the meditation that he is forced to perform everyday for 15 min and in spite of being able to sense that he is sleep deprived, how the meditation is actually helping him concentrate better with his academia; I could feel a drastic change in his tone. 

He was then saying that it took him a lot of time to get used to this hostel life without gadgets and gaming. He said he has made very good friends and they all spend quality time; he explained the non-academia things they do to rewind after a busy day at college. To my surprise, he was appreciative of the conducive environment within the campus due to non-availability of mobile phones. I recalled all the games he played on the mobile phone in the past and told myself “not bad”.

And then came the most important thing, his future plans: He said he was confused about his future plans. He said he is unable to decide yet whether to go for both JEE-Mains and Advanced or just prepare for JEE-Mains so that it would help him prepare for K-CET and Comed-K in parallel. He spoke at length on why he thinks getting into an IIT would be difficult for him. He said he doesn't know if it is just insecurity with all that has happened recently or fear or both, that is stopping him from knocking the doors of IIT. Then he spoke of his hatred for chemistry. He took a pause to recall his dad’s love for chemistry and then went on talking about how he finds Chemistry so boring and difficult to even balance simple chemical equations; how he thinks those IUPAC names are just crazy and how chemistry alone has pulled his GPA down by significant margin. He was sad that he was still a seven point someone :). 

At that moment, I took a pause. For someone who has always discussed movies, super heroes, gaming and fantasy novels with me, such serious conversations were a little hard for me to absorb. My nonchalant nephew that I saw just six months ago was having such a mature conversation with me. 

I did not express any emotion, but I realized that he sensed that disconcerting look on my face too. This entire conversation lasted for about an hour and a half. At the end of it, the realization that I am in my late thirties already was hard to come by *winks*.

I just nodded happily and gave a subtle reply “Well, that is youth for you. It sets its own boundaries without even asking whether the body & mind can take it or not”. I advised him to start preparations for K-CET, COMED-K and JEE Mains, with a vision to get into a good NIT. When I said “As a fallback, we always have very good engg colleges in Karnataka too” he looked somewhat convinced and the conversation ended. I went inside and just told my sister “Don’t worry about his behavior. He is in the process of defining himself”. 

Until now, I was not a proponent of the belief that adolescence is a stage in life. But I am convinced that it is changed now. The saying "Chronological age is not a biological marker" is more evident than ever; even more so with the millennials. This entire episode felt like reading a Paulo Coelho’s novel. Phew; the fingers of time played a heavy chord selection on the emotional strings of my guitar!