I was never able to bond with my classmates or teachers from my school, and the primary reason involving economic hierarchy. I was that forgettable weirdo, who would be the butt of laughter, and that was how I used to cope with classmates I could not relate to, and hated dearly - by creating a joker persona, and lying to them with a mask hiding my true feelings for them. Well, I don't follow anyone on any social media for my own sanity - well, I don't have any social media account, to begin with. No Facebook, no WhatsApp, no Insta, no Snapchat, no Discord, no Twitter - basically, none of those. Just Lemmy and a Gmail account, that's it.

Today, out of sheer curiosity, I was reminded of a person from my senior grade, and I tried looking about them. And since I don't have an account, I tried to stalk them on Google - which is almost useless, because unless you're famous, or have a blog written for you, you'll not show up. Except that there was a blog written in one of those Ivy university pages, with their picture, and how they've got VCs sucking their toes.

Maybe I shouldn't have tried this stupid experiment, because this hit me hard like a truck, and I don't think I'll be able to recover from this. For context, they are an American citizen, who were also my classmate in one of the senior schools in Mumbai. They got into a really good university. They have completed multiple cool internships a few years ago, in big MNCs. They have co-founded a cool AI company associated with the service industry (the same that will steal low-skill-requirement, crappy-wage jobs), and partnered with other rich tech-nepo-babies from Ivy leagues, and life seems to be just great for them in the expensive part of California - which, coincidentally, their Indian-origin dad and mom bought multiple houses and other properties for them way back around the 90s, again, in Bay Area. So in a way, they're doing insanely well than the average American.

But me? I've graduated a crappy, no-name uni. I've quit my crappy exploitative "intern-shit" last January after barely working for three months, and remained unemployed to this day. I've yet to find an "internship", because sure as hell they'll not be hiring someone like me in a congested IT market like India, without any proof of experience. Don't have any ancestral property, or that dead, rich uncle from Switzerland. I've tried my best for an entire year, only for the dominoes to crumble down all over me. In a few days, I'll be 24, and I'm pretty sure this feeling of dread, failure and shame will worsen exponentially.

FML, FR.