1 Sleepless Night, 1 Essay Completed

So a representative from the career cell walks up to me and says,

"Just so you know, the essay to make you eligible for the one-year scholarship program to UPenn is to be given on Saturday."

It was Thursday afternoon.

So after panicking and wondering what to write, I finally got to a point on where to start and at 4:20 am I finished with it.

It looks a little something like this:

What makes Virpratap Vikram Singh eligible and qualified to being awarded this scholarship? Is it what I have come from, perhaps it is where I am now or maybe it's where I see myself going in the future?

 

Is that really why one should be awarded this scholarship? Everyone has gone through problems in the past, be it academic or be it personal. Everyone comes face to face with a choice, and most take the easy way out as they give up.

 

What makes me, me, is that I never give up.

 

As I write this, I am reminded of a story from the Greek Myth of Heracles; in the story, Heracles is confronted by a shadowy figure, Heracles a headstrong child of the gods questions the figures intentions. The figure replies by offering Heracles a choice, stretching out its arm, it indicates to two paths. The figure elaborates that these are the two paths that Heracles' life can take. The first was beautifully made to ensure the comfort of the traveller – the path of ease. The other one was covered with broken stones and jagged rocks, covered by dark and thorny trees. The figure labels this as the path of strife. On this path, Heracles would be faced with dangers, troubles and sorrow worse than his darkest nightmares; he would lose friends and be scorned by many. But at the end of it all, he would be remembered for his deeds and his name would be sung for eons for his bravery and noble virtues. Needless to say Heracles chose this path, the path of the hero. A path that few walk on and fewer still are remembered for.

 

I believe in this story and the meaning behind it, and that understanding is what I think makes me more eligible for this scholarship; the knowledge that even when it seems like the odds are against me, I will prevail where others have failed. Not because I am better than them, but because I won't give up and I can keep hoping that all will be well in the end.

 

I have faith in the concept of the Liberal Arts, the idea of improving the reasoning capability of a student's mind echoes the ancient teachings of the Greeks, which in this day and age are neglected. What seem to matter to people in India is the knowledge that is held by the bonds of a textbook, and the struggle that I faced in my life have been me trying to hold onto my identity of being a thinker and a doer, not just a listener.

 

Before I even became a student of Liberal Arts, I began to look at the world through critical eyes, after having spent my childhood out of India; my formative teenage years were heavily influenced by the sights and sounds that I saw in India. It was like the world had gone from black and white to full-blown colour, and it influenced my thinking processes to an even greater extent. I would not be half the person I am today if I had not lived abroad, it is a simple truth.

 

The prospect of being able to leave India with the knowledge that I have learned here so far, to be able to share and add to those thoughts is a beautiful prospect, as in today's day and age, what we need are new thoughts. The exposure that I would get at the University of Pennsylvania from their faculty and from the students there would certainly bring new takes on every facet of life.

 

The shadowy figure that appeared before Heracles comes not once, but many times in our lives. It comes and offers us a choice. I long ago decided that I would not take the path of ease, but that I would rather face the toils that life had to offer. This opportunity to go to the University of Pennsylvania is a big decision, one that would have an impact on my life in every way. That is why I consider it a challenge, because, I would be challenged to make sure that every second counts.

 

So what do you think? I thought it was quite an interesting insight into myself. Maybe I won't get the scholarship, but I do like how this essay came out in the end...

Now to start working on the remaining 4 assignments which are due later this week.

 

Sacrifice Everything

This is an extract of the first story that I have written for my (crosses fingers) potential book.

There might be some errors, grammatical and otherwise. Hope you enjoy it!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sacrifice Everything

Personal Diary of the Commander of the 7^th Honour Guard

Location: Mlimanjaro Citadel on African Plateau

Date: UNKNOWN

14.370 Units

“Company Halt!” I barked, as the 7^th division neared the edge of the citadel walls.

I turned behind and observed my group of 64 fighters gathered around the edge of the walls. Down below, I could see our brethren getting into similar positions. They were magnificent; born in tranquillity, trained for security, but destined to die in chaos.

My fighters were all 6 feet tall, strong enough to wrestle an elephant and quiet enough to sneak up on the deadly serpents that roamed the fields around the citadel. But all the warriors of the citadel were trained to be like that. This made the sole requirement to be an Honour Guard was to be handpicked by the Goddess.

 As I prepared to address them and could immediately feel their gazes fall on me, the runt of the litter, at a miniscule 5’9ft, whom had surpassed all odds, and stereotypes, to get to this posting.

The Honour Guard was usually comprised of the biggest warriors and the smartest tacticians. I failed most battle simulation during training, and the day that I stopped growing taller, I felt that my dream of being an Honour Guard was gone.

But the Goddess had other plans, you see, when we are young, we are judged by the Goddess and labelled as being worthy to defend the citadel when needed. At the age of 4, we are thrown into a world of war and hardship where we fight to survive. If you’re not trained for war, you become symbols of peace and prosperity as scholars, farmers, or metal-smiths, the backbone of the Grand Citadel.

After nearly 13 years of training, my platoon of nearly 400 men and women marched up the five levels of the citadel towards the stairway that descended towards the Goddesses temple. As we marched, I had one thought in my mind that I was going to prove myself worthy of the title of Honour Guard.  As we reached the staircase, I cast my eyes down into the abyss I knew I was meant to be here.

The citadel was built with the sole purpose of protecting the temple of the Goddess and its secrets. The citadel was constructed in a conical shape, to simulate the volcanoes that once stood majestically on these plains. The end result was an artificial mountain, which stood majestically over the green forest that spread out over the rolling hills that surrounded the citadel. With the blessing of the Goddess, we named it Mlimanjaro.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is more, A LOT MORE

Hope you're hungry!

The Bigger Picture

Look! I found an assignment from my Sustainability Studies Class!
The assignment was to write a story about a group of 50 people who have been stranded on a deserted island. The story must revolve around their hunt for resources and also they cannot escape the island. Ever.

Looks like a good plot for a TV Show!


Wait didn't they already make that show?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Bigger Picture

Day Three

What a day, after 2 days of walking along the coast of this island I’ve finally found the others from the shipwreck. One of them was smart enough to get a fire going yesterday afternoon so the smoke signal was a good enough indicator as to where they were.

Everyone is still quite shocked by the event, I mean, it’s not every day that you’re stuck on a sinking ship miles from civilisation. I guess the shock hasn’t hit me yet.

Day Five

In one day the camp has grown in strength from 20 people to as much as 45, there are some people who are convinced that we should start trying to find ways off the island. Most agreed.

Against better judgement I argued that we needed to rest and regroup, we had all suffered a traumatic experience, and physical exertion on that scale would probably kill us even faster.

No sooner had I said this that a few more people stood up and pointed out that we should start looking for food and fresh water.

I do believe that we have a chance of survival, for the time being, assuming that we can agree on our next step.

Day Six

We sent off search parties today. Some are to go along the coast, looking for survivors, others are heading into the island to search for food and water, so far we had been eating fish but we needed some diversity, something else.

Our supplies are running out.

Three people who got injured while escaping the ship have died. We buried them, some people actually wanted to eat them. I protested.

People are starting to look to me as being the leader; I simply say that it’s the right thing to do in the long run. But as far as I can see it, there are the long term viewers and the short term viewers. The logical and the idiots, and the idiots are trying to gain supporters.

Day Seven

The first search party has returned. They had managed to bring back a warthog which they had killed. Sadly two of them have been seriously injured and without medical supplies it doesn’t look promising...

We’ve harnessed a nearby stream, the best water I’ve ever tasted; only problem is that it takes 3 hours to get it from the stream to camp.

Day Eight

Another search party has returned with great news, they’ve managed to find a bunch of caves in the mountains. We started figuring out the logistics of the move, naturally someone had to have a problem with this, and they turned out to be the idiots who were still trying to gain supporters. They objected to the move saying that moving away reduces our chances of rescue and also moves us away from the natural resources that are present around us

In the end we agreed to have an outpost system where two people will stay a few days on the beach at the area where the most amount of debris washed up. With that system settled, we started packing to move into the caves. They still weren’t happy but they stopped complaining.

Day Nine

The last search party from the coast returned with no survivors, they did find an old man, but he died on the return journey from exhaustion, they buried him in the shade.

I got attacked the other night, I didn’t see who, but I am sure that it was the idiots. They have begun to become irritants: they don’t work, they don’t contribute but they still eat a large amount of whatever meat and fruits that we find. I’m going to need a solution to them soon.

Also, several of them keep disappearing during the day and returning exhausted, are they working on something behind my back?

Day Ten

Around 20 people have disappeared from our newly assembled campsite, not surprisingly they were all the slackers. Good Riddance.

Day Eleven

Our new camp is finally set up, it’s not bad, but it is defiantly a lot nicer than the humid beach. People have started to make friends despite the horrible conditions. This shows good promise for the future.

The camp may be shabby, but the rest of the island from this vantage point of the caves it truly seems like Eden, there is a forest in which there are plenty of animals and trees with fruits and berries. The stream is now even closer, a good 20 minutes to get there and back. The caves are surprisingly devoid of bats and birds which made it easy for us to occupy the caves and make beds out of some leaves.

Everyone is now getting anxious to start the process of moving forward, their optimism is good, but they all agree that any rescue attempt will take some time, and construction of a boat can always be attempted once everyone is ready to move forward.

Personally, I feel that a lot of these people are connecting to nature in a way they could have never done before, sure there’s the poor soul who wanders around occasionally trying to get a phone signal, but everyone else is enjoying this, isolation.

That is, before we attempt to get off of this island.

Day Thirteen

As I mentioned, over the last few days we have decided to assign ourselves shifts and work in turns, take what we need and nothing else, we don’t know how long we are going to be here.

However, today when I was finishing my shift out in the forest and I was heading back when I saw a large pillar of smoke rise up; startled, I began to run towards the smoke, there should have not been anyone else out there. Grabbing one of the other survivors I told them to head back to the caves and stay there, that I was going to go and check out what happened.

As I ran towards the smoke, I heard a steady thump of hammers. I came out onto an enormous clearing with an enormous pile of tree trunks piled up in the distance. I could see a building civilisation; houses were being constructed with an enormous fire in the centre.

I approached through the trees the long way around.

I observed that several of the men were armed with primitive tools, stone knives and bows. I would really applaud their innovation if they hadn’t been motivated by violence.

Day Fourteen

I came back to the budding settlement this time, to confront them. I met with their leader, a big guy who never gave his name.

I congratulated their construction, and their will to adapt to this island, so fast. I only made sure that they understood that this was our island as well as theirs, and that they should try and only use what they need.

The big guy didn’t like that, and the next thing was that I was pinned to the wall throat first with in my face saying that they weren’t going to share, (he said it with such loath in his voice, like it wasn’t an option) he continued saying how that until they were rescued, they were going to take whatever they wanted into order to be comfortable and to keep that fire burning.

He released me and I fell to the ground as two guards came in and proceeded to beat me up a bit, throwing me out of their camp with a broken finger and a fractured leg. Bleeding, I cursed my misfortune and the naive nature of the fools. Clouds had started to roll in and thunder rumbled in the distance.

I started to limp back to camp, as rain drops started to fall.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's quite a read, but I don't think I did too badly. What do you think?

Hello? Is this thing on?

Hi!

I'm so happy to be able to write on this blog again! College has started and things are going great.

Why haven't I been posting? I'll tell you why. My college is kind of paranoid about websites where you can share content. Perfectly understandable. Unfortunately it includes blogspot, which sucks.

I've written some articles for my school newspaper, which are older post. Check them out and comment please

Then there is the book that I've been working on, it is now, two books. The one I was writing has been stopped so I can write a prologue of short stories to establish the universe and its mythos. An extract will be posted.

Lastly, there is the future. I have (due to the current absence of internet security on the wifi) selected the option to post via email. Thus circumventing the block placed on blogspot!

This is gonna be more fun now! =D

The Concept of Liberal Arts

The Concept of Liberal Arts

By Virpratap Vikram Singh

As I write this, the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts nears the end of its second month of classes. The classes have been different to say the least. Gone are the days where we learned history from boring textbooks and dictated scientific definitions like walking encyclopaedias. We are students of Liberal Arts.

But what are the Liberal Arts?

Liberal What?

The term Liberal Arts refers to a curriculum or course of seven subjects that are designed to impart general knowledge while simultaneously stimulating a student’s rational thought capabilities. If you want to look at it in a much simpler term, the Liberal Arts are to make you street smart.

The concept of Liberal Arts has its root in Ancient Rome where liberal arts truly meant, the ‘free’ arts. It was labelled this as it denoted the status of a free person and their rights to think, as compared to a slave who only received manual skills.

In the 5^th Century AD, Martianus Capella, a writer from Algeria, classified the Liberal Arts into 7 subjects: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. These were further subcategorised into two parts, the Trivium and the Quadrivium.

Trivium and Quadrivium – Not elements from the periodic table

Trivium was a term that meant the ‘three ways’ in Latin or rather the ‘three roads’ of medieval liberal arts education. It included subjects like grammar, logic and rhetoric. The grouping could be best described as follows:

“Logic is the art of thinking; Grammar is the art of symbols and combining them to express thought; while Rhetoric is the art of communication to convey thoughts from one mind to another.”

The study of these three subjects was considered a necessity for the subsequent study of Quadrivium, sort of like the medieval equivalent to an undergraduate course.

Quadrivium means the ‘four ways’ in Latin and by extension means ‘the place where four roads meet’. The Quadrivium comprised of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy which used the preparatory work set in place by the Trivium.

It was during the time of Plato that the outline of the Quadrivium course was laid out. According to them and early Pythagorean writings, all mathematical sciences could be divided into 4 parts.

One half dealt with quantity and the other half with magnitude. These both were described as being two-fold, i.e., having two parts, as quantity could be with regards to the character by itself or, in relation to another quantity. As for magnitude, it could be either stationary or in motion.

Keeping this in mind, arithmetic studies quantities; music studies the relation between quantities; while geometry looks at magnitudes at rest, and astronomy studies when magnitudes inherently move.

The completion of the Quadrivium entitled the student to the medieval equivalent to our current Masters of Arts degree. It was from here that the student would dive into the fields of Philosophy and Theology, sometimes known as liberal arts par execellence, where the art of thinking and conveyance of thought is crucial.

So there you have it, Liberal Arts, a concept of education that reaches further back in time than Newton’s Laws of Motion. A concept that was used to denote the freedom of the individual in the Roman Empire is now accomplishing a similar goal once again. By studying Liberal Arts, we are being giving the ability to think, and to share those thoughts, so that we can become the shapers of ‘tomorrow’ and not the preservers of ‘today’.

On The International Front

On The International Front...

By Virpratap Vikram Singh

On the weekend of the 17^th and 18^th of September 2011, the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts had its first interaction with other colleges on a competitive levels in the form of TMMUN held in Mumbai.

Pre-Exam Jitters

As the first event that SSLA was formally attending, the 4 delegates, myself included, were very nervous, would we live up to expectations? Would we come out near the top or fall into our own excrement?

Personally, it took me a walk and a very awkward conversation with a stranger for me to shift focus from the intimidation of the event and move into a position which I would like to label as “SSLA owns all your bases” I decided that I as a proud representative of SSLA would go into this conference with the utmost confidence and fight to come out on top.

Life constantly gives us lessons on how nothing ever really goes to plan.

First, the agenda kept making me think, ‘What the hell do I do? I’m Indonesia! What possible role can I have in giving a solution to the question of Guam?’

Then there was the issue with research, as a first time Muner (the colloquial term for participants) I was hard pressed to find relevant documents on the agenda

Add in some confusion on the requirement of a Position Paper (your countries stance) or the requirement of an opening speech and you have 4 delegates sitting the day before the conference, petrified of what may come.

The conference started and I must honestly report that all things considered, it was a very well planned event, however, the delegates present had prepared so little that anyone from SSLA could have given most of them a run for their money.

“Delegate of Indonesia...”

I heard my name being called out, and I stood, as I shuffled my sheets and delivered an opening speech I had composed a matter of hours before the event started. I sat when I was done and heaved as sigh of relief at the fact that I hadn’t pissed anyone off nor did I upset the Chair.

After that, I began to sink into a sort of groove, I knew what I had information on, and I was persistent to ensure that my points were heard and that the committee knew that I was the delegate of Indonesia. Whether it was raising points of debates when we were in session, or whether it was throwing an opposing delegates comment back at her when she said:

“The delegate is slow, can you give me some time to understand what you said.”

“Okay, then how about I clarify...”

“Can you just let me absorb what you’ve said?!?”

“The delegate just mentioned she was slow, I’m only trying to make it easier for her to understand”

This leads me to the main message of this MUN, the Spirit of MUN

The Spirit

The spirit of an MUN is still not clear to me, and I’m sure it will continue to escape me for a long time. Why? Because an MUN has so many different faucets for an individual to show their prowness; there is research, public speaking, negotiating, and writing. All play a vital role in an MUN and this is what breathes life into an MUN, if you have a committee who can write, but can’t speak, then your MUN is doomed (ominous prophetic voice)

I think the message I’m trying to convey to the readers of this article is that an MUN is a great place to learn about the dirty side of international politics. As a core member of the MUN Team, I would like to invite any and all SSLA students considering a future in law, international relations, economics, environmental management, psychology and political studies to come and ask me or the other core members (Agnayee and Krithika) about the experiences you’ll get in an MUN.

Also, I would like to mention that in every committee SSLA was in, we won an award, so congratulations to them. Did you know that when you win an MUN, you can win money?

That’s right; MUN’s can earn you some cash for your next meal out! Now who thinks talking is a waste of time?