Glimpses from Alumni Meet

It was the summer of 2011, and a school friend was rattling off names of colleges in Kolkata, over the phone. This call was one of her last attempts at bailing me out of my indecision over zeroing in on an institution from which to get an Honours degree, in English. “Shri Shikshayatan College”, a name I had not heard before, featured belatedly in our conversation.
I had let go of the opportunity to pursue engineering and been officially evaluated as lacking the aptitude for an education in medicine in India, and in zoology, in one of Kolkata’s premier national universities. With the reality of a non-existent future in my first-choice realm of study brought home heartbreakingly, and invaluable pre-admission time lost in coming to terms with the rejections, self-doubts have begun chipping away at the last remnants of my self-worth.
Convinced that I had no face or academic talent to make anything worthwhile of myself, I resigned to the likelihood that the next phase of my life would be an extended run of, what my upbringing in a conservative lower-middle-class set-up, popular culture, and society at large had conditioned me into thinking of as, “failures”. So, after a belated enrollment in English Honours at Shri Shikshayatan College I remember thinking to myself, “Could there be any truth to the notion of people, at times, finding themselves at junctures where places and projects choose them, instead of it being other way round?”
*Some of the things I’ve done since graduating from SSC in 2014 include completing a master’s degree in English and a post-graduate diploma in mass communication; playing cricket at the district level under the Cricket Association of Bengal; winning ESPNcricinfo Cricjockey, a national-level talent-hunt for cricket commentators; joining ESPN (India) Digital Media’s editorial team in Mumbai as a full-time multimedia reporter and editor; covering the 2020 Women’s T20 World Cup in Australia as an ESPNcricinfo reporter; appearing on the BBC Test Match Special radio programme as a guest expert; writing the cover story for the 113th issue of the Olympic Review, the official magazine of the Olympic Movement; and covering global sports events as an International University Sports Federation Young Reporter (Taipei 2017 Summer University Games), International Olympic Committee Young Reporter (Buenos Aires 2018 Summer Youth Olympics and Lausanne 2020 Winter Youth Olympics), International Sports Press Association-Sports Journalism Federation of India Young Reporter (Bhubaneswar Men’s Hockey World Cup 2018), and the 2019 Wuhan Military World Games, as a writer-photographer for CISM, the governing body of military sports.

Siddhi Karnani
Batch 2014
Shri Shikshayatan College