Book the First

In about a week, I will be finished with finals and finished with my freshman year of college. College, the best four years of a person's life, in which personal and mental growth is unbridled and infinite. College, the land of dreams and the land of opportunity, the hallowed halls of learning. Thus ends the first book in the four-part saga of me at college.

For that's what it should be. A saga, a legend. Even if I am the only one who ever wishes to sing my tale, these years, and years to come, must be epic, on the grandest of scales. These finishes must be climactic, lightning flashes, thunder claps, fireworks burst all around my head in a whirlwind of glory, and the 1812 Overture playing throughout.

Do I have any regrets? Perhaps. Perhaps I should have studied more and socialized less. Or perhaps I should have studied less and socialized more. Perhaps I should have focused less on my flaws and walked the streets of Berkeley more confidently. Or perhaps I should have focused more on my flaws and observed why my flaws effect people to behave towards me as they do. Perhaps I should have focused more on forging unbreakable bonds between people. Or perhaps I should have worried less about making them.

Do I have contentment? Absolutely. I walked into Berkeley and into a sea of vibrancy such that I had never seen before, in environment, in academics, in personalities, and in thought. I joined Dil Se and discovered Indian people, the next generation, united in singing and music, and I broadened the scope of my skill. I discovered great friendship, great closeness, of a magnitude previously unknown to me. I refined my philosophies and trained my mind; I pondered and pursued and talked and traveled. I was responsible for myself and relished the freedom, the exhilaration of being solely in control of many aspects of my life. My world blossomed with a kind of harmony I dreamed of, a beautiful symmetry and order within the blissful chaos.

Here, poised precariously as I am on the threshold of the end of my first year and the beginning of the next - which will bring greater knowledge, a summer unlike any I've seen yet, new faces, and new knowledge - I pause, briefly, to think, consider, breathe, take in my surroundings.

That, friends, is freshman year.