If It Comes Easy, There Is Something Wrong—My First Year of a New Life Ahead

This article has been submitted by Sweta Rath for the CLATGyan Blog Post Writing Competition. If you think this article is a good read, ‘Like’ this article on Facebook (the button is at the bottom of this piece) or post a comment using the ‘comments’ section below.

***

 “If it comes easy, there is something wrong”

This is what I learned in my first year of law school and what I intend to carry as a motto for my future years. What began as an instinct of an idea has now become so important that it’s going to define my future. Unlike most of my peers, law was not exactly in Agent Smith’s words “My purpose” but just a better option than the rest. Coming from a family of Engineers and being a hard core Bollywood fan, I had a different perception about college altogether and after coming here I realised why most of us never call it a law college but a law school.

The day I walked past the gates of law school, my Bollywood notions about college took an exit and the weight of tuition fees spent by my father fell on my head. There was no singing and dancing around, no group “addas” maybe because the campus is that small and no laid back attitude. Everyone was running here and there trying to get some work done. There were students who had law in their veins already, there were students who were trying to inject law into their veins as soon as possible, there were students who flipped all this and partied and then there were students like me wondering which category they belonged to—basically none. Home and old friends sickness was excruciating, new place and new rules were as difficult as the local language, and to top it off the legal jargons that made no sense. Many a times, it all even felt pointless. The thought of “should have taken up normal B.com course and should have stayed at home” was there and yes it was just too hard to understand people let alone make friends.

There are no TIPS to survive in law school or any college for that matter. There are no Do’s and Don’ts. It all depends on you how you want to make the best out of what you have. Since I was on my own, I took some right and some wrong calls. There is no “prevention is better than cure” theory. Very often I was faced with easy alternatives which were tempting. I even took up few of them but later realised that SRK was indeed right in DDLJ about taking the “easy path”. Hard work has indeed no substitute but what is more important is to “accept strengths and weaknesses and get past failures” because here we don’t have our parents to set things right for us. All this can only happen if we realise that what we are studying is not for the heck of it but because this is what is going to define us. People can always study for nights together and get a 3 pointer GPA but the real success is when we won’t be scared of being faced with a simple legal query.  5 years is a long time and I believe that a step by step approach is what is needed, even if we see people jumping from step 1 to step 5 directly.

Despite of all the heavy shockers and decisions, I am happy today because I found what according to me, is the most important thing to have- good people. By the end of first year I am able to call my hostel “home” and my friends “my new family” because of which everything became a tiny bit easier. The lunch hours were filled with laughter and the stress was divided. You will always have people ready for partying or imparting uninvited knowledge but people who make you smile by preparing good food for you in case you miss home, or are there to set you right when you are running towards the wrong are rare to find.

So this average student with no contacts is not scared anymore because she has her new family, her lessons of first year and the new found enthusiasm for what she is studying. Everyone will have their own experiences which might even be different but the one thing that we all will learn sooner or later is “believing in our self—truly “