When did I loose track?
Well, I fell hard. After fifth semester exams got over, I over-budged and did all sorts of shit. All the booze and weed, it got too much onto me. Like in order to tell you how I felt, all of friends got together, drunk and high at the same time, playing extra-loud music, and kept doing this on loop for 3 hours straight. I enjoyed the moment overall, my friends were telling me how good they felt with an altered psyche, while my brain was constantly resisting to get into its effect. I drank and smoked equally (might have smoked more), but didn't feel the effect of it anyhow. Slept late at night in Ansal's room.
Next day, I got up all drowsy around 10AM, had a shower, prayed (it came out of nowhere), ate and left for home.
What triggered the change?
When I got home, I still felt drowsy, and that feeling got away after another 12 hours of sleep. That very day, I decided to never be in that state again. When I came back to hostel, I registered for the gym (rather than playing badminton), started waking up early, started meditating and praying regularly, and reading at night (books, not articles). Academically, I started attending classes daily, practised Leetcode questions, and wrote and submitted a proposal for GSoC 2023. Later this month, I got some motivation from both Ansal and Aryan. Aryan Sanghi became 5 star rated on codechef, first student from our batch to do so, and Ansal Jain got selected for ICPC regionals, Kanpur region, which is one out of four regions of ICPC in India. It was the first time a team from our university got selected into ICPC, and that team was selected because they had Ansal with them.
Turns out, this was enough to motivate me to start competitive programming along with DSA that I was doing already. So I have been solving regularly for the past few weeks, and this happened yesterday.
Secured Global Rank 15 in the previous contest on Codechef, all thanks to logic that got built on Codeforces.
How's the record?
Right now, I'm in a state to push forward my limits and achieve the next goal. Also established our university's first society for Computer Science department, a coding club with an initiative to send more people into ICPC, give more 5 star coders, and excellent placement records over the coming years. On a personal level, I have been thinking about it for a very long time, and finally took the step to start with this.
What's next?
Don't know yet. I would have to think about it.