It’s been a year now since I graduated. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have gotten to take this time to myself after college.

Instead of throwing myself headfirst from one organised hierarchy into another, by formally continuing my education, or working a 9 to 5, I’ve been able to exist in the cracks of Indian society for a while, taking my own sweet time, and self-directing my learning. It has been extremely rewarding. The skills I cultivated since graduating last year were not skills that I was whipped into learning in any structured curriculum, or forced to develop for the purposes of corporate productivity. These skills were mine, are mine, and mine alone.

With the luxury of time, I am able to reflect on the teaching I received in college. I have been able to go back to my notes, sift through them, and re-examine the little gems I found interesting. Most importantly, I have been able to conduct this re-examination away from the controlled shadow of hierarchy, and in the light of a terrifying tropical paradise where the sun shines free. A.K. Ramanujan, O.V. Vijayan, Gautier, Huysmans and Petronius, the literary friendships I hold closest now, have all been the result of me going back and re-examining the paths I nervously hurried down so long ago. They are my gemstones who came alive in the sun.

The endless ideas that were machine-gunned at point-blank range into my head in college have had the time to calm themselves, settle down and make friends with each other. This maturing could not have taken place in any other scenario. Or, I think, at the very least, it would have taken much, much longer.

Slowing down my learning has paradoxically led to it speeding up. Sure, I was fast in college. I was so fast. But I also remember all the terrible, performed anxiety of corporate ‘fast’ — of running through masses of material mindlessly because everyone else is, of knowing you could be doing so much more because someone else is, and of agonising constantly about just how much you’re doing to everyone you meet. You only have so much stamina for this performance that the hierarchy demands of you before your learning suffers, no? 

To be slow, and consistent, to take breaks when affected, to ponder, is to slowly fall in love with every little flower by the road, and to wonder where every leafy path leads. A certain libido of discovery is set aflame, which thrives in the depths of slow, considered affection. With knowledge of this deeper satisfaction, and with this libido straining at the reigns, I ‘accomplished’ far more with a far greater stamina.

And so, now, I can say this to myself with some confidence — that I have learnt the skill of making my way through reading, writing and scholarship without being whipped, blindfolded, through the forest. Don’t get me wrong, hierarchy has benefited me as well. All the signposts I collected from those busy undergraduate intersections in my five years have given me a sense of safety, as, map in hand, landmarks imprinted, I get to make my own decisions on where I want to go without precedent or propriety.

And oh my fucking God, is it freeing! 

I hope it lasts.

In a nutshell, I think learning needs time away from hierarchy to truly settle. Is this what they call unlearning?