Why a Gap Year

Taken from a wee blog I had going in 2015

This is one question posed to me on multiple occasions. Excitement, confusion, scorn accompany this interrogation in the quest to understand this ‘deviant’ behavior. My answer never remains the same.

I like to change it up based on the mood and personality of the questioner. An extremely by-the-books character may get an answer about me wanting to possibly build my resumé or about me wanting to desperately help the environment and the beings living in it. A laid-back kind of guy may get an answer about me being fed-up with the IB and studying in general. A confused fellow may get an answer revolving around my quest to actually discover myself in the duration of this year. This, in some way, is all true. I DO want to help the environment and people. I DO want to get a break from my studies. I DO want to actually find myself. However, these are all secondary reasons to my desire to put off college by a full year of no studies.

The Primary Reason dates back to the summer of 2011 in the famed kitchen of Indigo Deli – an unbelievably amazing restaurant in Aamchi Mumbai. I had managed to score an actual internship at the naïve age of 13 with my expertise and knowledge of cooking restricted to Sunday cooking sessions with dad or mum and MasterChef Australia. So an internship at Indigo? What could go wrong?

Well, pretty much everything. I didn’t go to the extent of mixing up paneer with super-tender chicken or shedding hair into a chocolate mousse. What went terribly, disastrously wrong was that my expectations did not match up to reality. Masterchef Australia gives its viewers the impression that cooking is fairly effortless and anyone who is anyone can easily go ahead and be a chef. What they don’t tell you about, are the 8 hour shifts spent standing, preparing the ingredients, rather than the actual dish, while barely receiving any recognition for actually being the reason people enter the restaurant in the first place!

I, on the other hand, was an insignificant intern who expected to be preparing dishes at the flick of my left hand, while receiving the cooking-equivalent of an Oscar in my right hand.

Unfortunately, the countless hours of cleaning salad leaves and cutting vegetables rubbed off on me in the wrong way and the grunt work turned me into a grumbling and generally useless intern who could not commit to a short 1 month internship. This, by no means, was the fault of Indigo Deli: they had to deal with a 13 year old intern with practically 0 cooking experience. But what this did teach me was two incredibly important things:

Never undertake something while guarding enormous expectations of it. I may have a slight problem with commitment. The second point was not something that I had suddenly discovered at the twitch of an eye; it was something that I realized was within myself for quite a while and therefore I chose to do something about it. The smartest course of action, therefore, would be to throw myself in these incredible internship opportunities in this Gap Year with close-to-no way out just to see whether I can actually do it. If I can, great! If I can’t, I have no way out and I simply have to stick with it. And THAT, bhaiyo aur beheno is why I wanted to take this Gap Year – to deal with my irrationally rational fear of commitment.

I’m fairly that all my posts will not be introspective and self-doubting to this level (too painful to read and to write) and I promise to genuinely attempt to be mildly humorous! My posts should ideally allow you to view and experience a shortened version of my year of freedom and I really hope you enjoy it.

But now that you’ve read of the why, join me as I finally embark on my journey to write the what.