Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.

My mother—a single parent—works as a civil servant of Bhutan: due to her occupational hazards, I was entitled to attend boarding school and travel alone at a young age. Ever since I started to attend boarding school—in the sixth grade-- I have been travelling alone from Bhutan to Calcutta to Chennai.

Normally, a parent would not succumb to such an act, but ever since I could so much as think, I knew I was not a normal child. I stopped giving in to horror movies once I realized they were fake, addendum: the fake 100 Ngultrum bills my mother would hide under my pillow whenever I lost a tooth. I could understand most of the complex and foul languages used in conversations unlike my other classmates—maybe it was the outcome of the vast array of books that have kept me company in my lonely flights to, and fro, Bhutan and India. I was more mature than the others my age.

School had just ended and I was on my way back to Bhutan. From Chennai, I had to stop by Calcutta and take the first plane to Bhutan in the morning, which was around twelve hours away. Normally, the airport would allow transit passengers waiting long flights to take shelter indoors, but on this particular day, due to certain circumstances—to this day I still don’t understand—I was told to wait outside. You would normally think it being cruel to have an innocent thirteen year-old boy standing out… but it is India. I was anxious, the battery on my phone died due to excessive gaming to pass the long waiting hours in the airport, I could not call anyone.

This was the first time this had happened to me and I felt constricted. I checked my wallet and noticed I had a few thousand rupees, which equaled to less than $75 at the time. I sat down on my bags, and thought of the possibilities that might have me survive the night. I asked and begged the guards to let me in, I showed them my tickets and my passport, yet they refused and told me to wait until the morning. This has never happened before. Had I grown or looked older? I got frustrated and so I asked one of the—with the little Hindi I know—guards for a cheap hotel anywhere nearby. He introduced me to this shabby taxi driver with crooked brown teeth, ragged clothes and grey hair, almost balled.

He took me to a hotel, ten minutes drive away from the airport and charged me 500 rupees. I knew I was being ripped off, probably because of my age, but I did not want to offend them in anyway as I had reserved them to pick me up the next day for the same price. The hotel was in the shadiest part of town, pitch black with drunks walking around swearing abruptly in Hindi. I grabbed a hold of my items, checked into the hotel (which was 1200 rupees for the night) and locked myself in.

The fan above my head creaked boisterously, shrouding the unceasing barks of dogs and the unending noise of drunken men enjoying their evening debauchery. The lemon yellow paint was peeling off the wet walls and the fan looked like it was going to drop. I lay on my bed anxious and wondering how I got myself into this sketchy situation. I wanted to go home.

The next morning, the taxi driver had never left the area, as he seemed to have just slept in his car. He carried my luggage and placed them into the trunk and I jumped in on the front seat, as there seemed to be a drunken man sleeping on the back. The driver sat in the front seat, trying to converse with me in Hindi despite knowing that I know very little of the language as he drove me to the airport.

As I left for the airport and headed home, along with a sense of relief, I also felt proud of myself. These isolated experiences show you that in the end you have to depend on yourself and how important it is to have a cool head and your wits about you. My sense of independence may not have been entirely derived from this stand-alone experience but it is sharply etched in my memory and as an effect has made me a braver and stronger person. As an unintended consequence, I had to take a big risk and in the end I believe I handled it very well. Independence means making strong and alert decisions even in the most harrowing of times.