1. In the year 2050, a movie is being made of your life. Tell us the name of the movie and briefly summarize the story line. (NYU)
a. Movie title: The story of a billionaire
b. Rating: 8.5/10
c. Plot: This excellent encapsulation of the life of billionaire and humanitarian Varun Kedia starts off in his school years, where he was a very average student with a dream. Then one night after a dramatic fight with his parents he ran away from his home and began living on the streets. There he found work as a waiter, then manager of the mamamia chain of restaurants. After working there for almost eight years, the owner, also his very close friend passed away in a tragic accident and left the entire chain to Varun. Varun overwhelmed with the responsibility vowed to work hard to make his boss proud. He expanded the chain into over one hundred countries, this threatened the owners of such giants as McDonalds and KFC who on multiple occasions attempted to buy the chain but Varun disagreed every single time. Soon Varun had another great idea, he stared another chain of low-cost hotels called the cozy corners these were an instant success further adding to his wealth and panache. Varun more confident than ever, went on to such industries as airline catering, and soon after came the Kedia airlines, the first seven star airline in the world. After briefly making a two month appearance in the worlds top ten richest people he decided to give to charity. Heavily inspired by legends such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, Varun gave half of his wealth to various charity reducing his worth from 30 to 15 billion dollars. Though this action insured he would never again make the top ten richest people in world again the public loved and respected him more than ever. This great man with no collage experience, no extra training, took his experience, ambition and followed his dream. He is a great example to all those who don’t have formal education. Hard work and always sticking to your goal is what’s important.
2. Write an imaginary dialogue between you and a roommate late at night when the lights are out and neither of you can sleep.
a. RM2: yo, you wake
b. RM: yea, no one can sleep with the rain and the loud ass thunder
c. RM2: its cold as hell isn’t it
d. Rm: yea, did you study for the test tomorrow
e. RM2: no, what test, no one told me about a test, shit am dead.
f. Rm: just go to the bathroom and study rite now, you can’t sleep anyway
g. RM2: no, it’s cold as hell outside my bed, I aint goin nowhere
h. Rm: how typical, you don’t study shit and blame fate and destiny when you fail the damn test
i. RM2: screw you, im going
j. (walks out the door after putting on a sweatshirt and track pants)
k. (as soon as I walk out, I run back inside)
l. Rm: what happened?
m. RM2: Mr Tim is outside I’ll get caught, I hate my life the one time I get out to study is when there’s a dorm-parent outside.
n. (long silence)
o. RM2: what do you want to do with your future?
p. Rm: well, next year ill take AP chem and then get a five in the exam, and I already have a 2300 in my SAT so I should be able to get into MIT. After that I want to study chemical engineering and take polymers. I think am goanna go on and get a PHD. After my PHD ill join a private research team and hopefully by the time am 55 years old I should find a substitute for polythene bags that doesn’t destroy nature.
q. RM2: did you ever consider the fact that they may not use polythene bags thirty years from now.
r. Rm: no, but my plans better than yours, wanna repeat what you told me last time
s. RM2: pass school somehow, watch every robbery move there is you know oceans, Italian job you name it, then ill make a crew rob a bank and become rich
t. Rm: what bullshit
u. RM2: at least ill become rich and have fun all my life, while you’ll work you ass of and still be poorer than me
v. Rm: that’s not what life is about anyway, its about making your parents proud and getting respect from people
w. RM2: wanna join my crew last chance, I need a explosive guy anyway
x. Rm: were very different people.
y. RM2: I know.
i. *everything said in this essay must be considered as fiction, it is written for the purposes of the essay only.
- What is your approach to life? Reveal your life philosophy.
- What is my approach to life? Fun before work, living on the edge or in the moment. Not planning the future, taking things on as they come. I don’t really have a philosophy in life. I simply live life as any other person does, I conquer trouble when it comes, I have fun when the opportunity presents itself. I work when I have to, no more no less. I simply live life the way its supposed to be lived, no complication. I hate complication, it makes everything so much worse. I like things in either black or white, no fuzzy shades of grey. So as life comes to me, I take it, I believe in destiny fate and all those things, what we do, say and feel is predetermined. Why add complication, why change things why plan for the future, why worry, why feel tension? Just make the most out of what you have today. What’s the point of working so hard when you miss out the best things in life like family and friends? Why diet on green vegetables, when a hotdog is just so delicious, who cares. Why workout and tire yourself every single morning when you can eat what you want but not overdo it, why not metabolism do all the work. I believe in simplicity, others call it laziness. I live by these words, I enjoy life with what I have and I try not worry about what is to come. The great turtle guy from the movie kung-Fu panda, quoted while standing under the sacred peach tree of wisdom, “yesterday was history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift that’s why it’s called present.”
4. If you had a do-over
- Only if I had a do over is a statement many people think about many times. If I had a do- over I would do over my ninth grade school year. I admit had a lot of fun during that time but I gave up on studies. I let my GPA plummet and I regret it now. I was irresponsible like many of my friends and now when applying for collage; it is something that I regret a lot. Maybe I’ll remember that year many years after I graduate from college, maybe it was one of the best years of my life, but currently its killing my GPA and preventing me from going into good collages, which then hinder my plans of becoming a billionaire. If I had a do-over I wouldn’t mess around with friends all the time, I wouldn’t play games in study hall. I would do all my homework, I would have listened to my parents and studied, put my best effort in because after all it was the year that counted. Many of my friends regret screwing around in the ninth grade, those who could have gone to Harvard have to settle for chapman and those who could have gone to chapman have to settle for Ohio. If some how I got a do-over I would do my ninth grade year again, I would improve my grades and hence my future. But the fact is that in reality, no one ever gets a do-over. If we got a do over for everything we did, we would never make mistakes and we would never learn from those mistakes. In fact I think that we would spend our whole lives fixing these mistakes rather than making new ones and learning from them, and insuring we never repeat them again.
5. if you had the gift of telepathy, the ability to read other people’s minds, would you use this gift or not? Explain
a. If one day I woke up with the gift of telepathy, I would definitely use it. In fact I think it would be particularly stupid not to use such a unique ability. I would use it in secrecy of-course because I would lose all advantage of having such a talent. Honestly if I had the gift of telepathy I would mostly use it for my self gain, and hardly for the benefit of the general public. I think that the first thing I would do is, I would go to Las Vegas and hit the poker tables there. I would make a fortune for myself. Speaking quite honestly, though I would probably start of playing with good intentions, human greed would envelop me. I would most probably end up spending the money on my self. If the power of telepathy came to me, by instinct I would probably use it. I would not think about the long term consequences such as being seriously affected by greed or even other people finding out. Apart from using the gift of telepathy for personal gains, other opportunities are endless. One could virtually be successful in any career, the possibilities for deception are endless. If I had the power of telepath I would surely use it, and who knows if I had such a gift, I could be richer than bill gates or more famous than Einstein. Who knows, I might just do something good. I just need an opportunity with this skill and I think I could do or achieve anything in this world.
6. Describe witch quote represents you?
a. In response to the essay question, the quote the best represents me is “life is a daring adventure or nothing”(Helen Keller). But honestly this is the first quote I found when I googled inspirational quotes, it was in the life category. I actually believe that no single quote can represent human beings, our race is just far to complex, both emotionally and intellectually. Not even the most bland and jobless person can be represented by a single quote. Ranging from an ordinary high school kid like me to and eighty year old man, no single quote can define no single person. Humans are filled with too many contradicting feelings and personalities. A man can be generous but greedy, smart but foolish, and even hateful but find the space to love. Take the example of scrooge form Charles Dickens’ novel a Christmas carol, the stingiest man alive radically changed just by a series of dreams. The human personality is highly volatile, it can be subject to immediate and instant change. So no one single definite quote can define a person completely. I would like to give my own life as an example, referring to the quote given above I do love adventure and yet am a couch potato. I love playing sports like football, I love going on long hikes and purposely getting lost for the sake of adventure and yet every Sunday I lie on my bed the entire day eating potato chips and drinking soda with the television blaring at its full volume. Like all others, I am, to the very core, too complicated to be defined by a single saying.
7. Dog and Cat. Coffee and Tea. Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye. Everyone knows there are two types of people in the world. What are they? (U of Chicago)
a. Authors of our world are always thinking of witty and odd ways to categorize people on earth, the more extravagant the better. But the point is none of them work except for the one I am going to propose to you. Even the ones that you have given in the question, none of them apply to me. I am allergic to pets, I neither drink tea nor coffee only coke, and I’m guessing that the great Gatsby and the catcher in Rye are books in which case I have neither read them nor ever even heard about them. So like I said most authors in this world are wrong when they make these exaggerated assumptions about dividing the world into two groups. There is only one way to divide our race into two groups, man and woman. Frankly I don’t know why no one has ever become popular over the basic fact that there is only one easy way (based simply on the sense of sight) to categorize the human race in two groups. Now as you are reading this you obviously be thinking that there are those in the middle, cross dressers or as they are known in India “chakkas”, in extreme cases even hermaphrodites. For those confused, to determine which group they belong to all they really need to do is take a little peak inside their pants to be categorized as either male or female. After this most of those who are confused are also grouped in one of two groups, all others who are left don’t deserve the title of being people or humans for that matter. Mutants or freaks of nature those who are stuck between both genders should be defined differently from the biological nomenclature of Homo sapiens to which, currently all even the mutants are defined by. Hence there is only one possible way to easily group all humans into two types, the most common and perhaps the most obvious Man and woman.
8. What do you do on a rainy day?
a. Like often telecasted on television, where I come from rainy days are usually very cold. So normally I get into bed and watch a movie, with some hot apple pie and ice cream. I always think that I am wasting the entire day on rainy days but it is a time I productively use to catch up on my favourite TV shows download any new movies I haven’t seen or just watch regular TV. But when I was small, maybe six or seven rainy days in my house hold were a little more exiting. I still have many fond memories of those days. We would call all our cousins over for a sleepover and those were some of the most fun nights ever. We would do stuff like camp out in the living room and plan all night monopoly sessions. Except you must not the word plan, those games lasted about an hour and ended with my sister crying because she went bankrupt. Nevertheless good times. Those nights we would watch TV, cook all the Maggie and Wai-Wai in the house (up to 20 packets) thinking we would eat it all and then waste it only to get scolded by our parents the next morning. At times we even turned rainy days into money making schemes. We would sit in front of all rooms and bathrooms demanding tolls, mom’s had to pay ten rupees per entry, any more and they would tell us to move and we would have to. With dad’s the cost was 250 rupees. They carried their wallets with them, and always paid, only because they thought we were cute. I remember the old days, what happened to them, why all of us grown apart have and now why do we all do the same thing and spend rainy days the same way. The innocence of child hood.
9. If animals could talk, what would your pet say about you?
a. I think if animals could talk my two pet turtles Johnny and Turbo would say different things about me, Johnny would hate my guts while Turbo would still hate me only less. I screw up a lot trying to raise two tiny little turtles, I often forget to feed them, turn their heater on when there are power cuts in Nepal and remodel their tank far too often, they can never get used to it. In fact Johnny and Turbo even had a brother whose name was Myter, strange name I know but he was the victim of a terrible turtle infection that killed him in the first two weeks, when he moved into the new tank. I think my turtles, depending on their turtle personality which I imagine is very dull and boring, would whine and complain all the time. Would They would want to go back to their natural habitat, they would want me to feed them on a regular basis and they would always shout at me for not turning their water heater on when the power goes out. But if my turtles could talk, I don’t think that I would be able to full fill their whish’s and hopes. It would certainly be easier to feed them and I would be reminded to turn their water heater on at the right time with shrieking cries of “ITS COLD!!” but I don’t think I would ever be able to let them live in their natural environment. Turtles are creatures of the sea and Nepal is a land-locked country. I could take the turtles to their parents in the aquarium, maybe even buy the parents and any other family but never fulfil their true dreams. Concerning why one turtle would hate me more, is because I once dropped Johnny on the floor and chipped his shell while showing him to friends on Skype. It’s a good thing pets can’t talk otherwise the world would be noisy place.
10. Should prison inmates be allowed to take college courses? Explain why or why not.
a. I don’t think that prison inmates should get an opportunity to take a college course, at least not while they are in prison. It sounds a bit harsh not give someone something everyone else can get, after all they are also equal humans. I think that they shouldn’t be allowed to take college courses because it beats the purpose of going to prison in the first place. Going to college will occupy them, it will give them something to do to cut the time in their cell. They can and will never learn their lesson if they don’t suffer in their jail cell. If prison inmates start getting a collage education while in jail it makes life easier for them inside than those people outside who dream of such an opportunity and struggle to get it. Inmates can do whatever they want once they get out of jail, they can pursue whatever job or degree in education but while in jail they must pay for their misconduct and part of the disadvantage of jail should be missing out on the opportunity of a college education. Who knows it may even reduce the crime rate by a minor percent or two. Prisoners in any jail should be stripped of all the rights and privileges that they enjoy in normal society. It is only a consequence of the crimes committed by them. When prison inmates get out jail, only a small percentage of them aspire to get a collage level education anyway, most of them aren’t even legible as they can’t read or have an incomplete high school level education. I don’t think that prison inmates deserve the opportunity take college courses because if people outside struggle to take these courses it is only unfair that those who have done wrong to society, those who have stolen, raped and killed get the chance at the luxury of their prison.