"This is not school guys, this is college!"...
The beginning of college is regarded, rightly perhaps, as the commencement of a new era, a new chapter in a person's life, for then he/she not only moves one notch up on the ladder of his/her ambition, but also comes, quite literally, into a bigger, wider world. The kind of exposure that you get, that I got and still am getting as a University student is rivalled by nothing else in the world.
For starters, there's this huge change, this, as professors of English Literature (which, coincidentally, is also what I am doing) will; call it, tremendous shift from uniformity (and associated vices like "dehumanisation" and "curbing of free will") to individuality (and hence the promotion of all things nice and wonderful). But before you rake your brain to guess what great and noble virtue I just expounded, then I am referring not to zombies of a mechanised, unnatural world rising to a day and age of natural freedom, but boys and girls of 18 years of age (or, as is the case here, 17 and a half) shedding their school uniforms to don 'new robes' of their choice. Great as it sounds to be able to break free from the same ol' uniform, believe me, there are not too infrequent days when the dilemma of to wear or not to wear forces you to wish for the good old days (inspite of the dehumanisation and curbing of free will..) to come back...
With individuality comes, as professors declaim time and again from their lofty pulpits, freedom. And oh boy, freedom it is! I mean, I was never a stickler for rules and regulations in school and neither was Bal Bharati the 'how can you have your pudding if you don't eat your meat' sort of an institution and so, even if there arose issues which had the potential to have too much of a "dehumanising effect" on our poor, innocent minds, we always manaed to circumvent them. This, and the fact that compared to various other 'public' schools in Delhi (where the pudding is seldom to be had even after eating the meat) always betrayed it in a gentler, kinder light, had convinced me that more freedom than this could never be enjoyed in any academic institution.
Illusions, however, are meant to be broken.
For apart from the radically fundamental freedom to make your own style statement (Hail individuality!), one has the freedom to walk out of classes if "free will" so dictates (though there is a 5 mark bonus for 85% and above attendance to prevent too much exercise of "free will"), to lounge all day long in the canteen (though that exposes you to the fatal 'canteen-o-philia'), to participate in any extra curricular activity without teachers poking in their noses and (this is most important because this is what I do the most) to sit for hours at end under the shade of a magnificent tree and read to one's heart's delight as well as to get not physically but mentally lost in the cavernous library and explore shelf upon shelf of cerebral delights...
Of course, there are times when the freedom becomes too much, times when the professors too exercise their freedom by abstaining from taking classes, times when you (and this is the most frustrating thing) brave the hostile battlefield of Delhi's bluelines to come helter-skelter to college to only discover all classes cancelled for some bally talent show...
Talking of buses, I think it wouldn't do any justice to my 'anubhav' of them if I were not to present an eulogy on the marvellously unique distinction of Delhi's buses in transforming, within the span of a few measly kilometres, a well dressed, amiable person at peace with the world into a completely disgruntled, disgusted individual. Truly, when my feet are stomped upon by the entire standing populace of a bus, when I get squeezed and sandwiched in between two incorrigible 'Jatta ka Choras' as if I were not a creature equipped with that blessed structural entity called the backbone, when I get cursed and shouted upon by an impatient horde of typical fire breathing Punjabis to jump out of a moving bus and when other people's private parts (unintentionally I hope!) touch and brush my shoulder, then I most ardently wish for the peace and comfort of the private school bus...
To revert back to my original theme, i.e. exposure, I really can't help writing about the kind of exposure that one gets of society, and of problematic societal issues in college. Therefore, while it is true that as a school going baccha I read newspapers and kept myself abreast of current affairs, it is also undeniable that I saw the world at large as the Lady of Shallot saw Camelot from her Ivory Tower; being twice removed from reality gave to me also a gaze of aloofness and indifference. However, college, with its protest marches and dharnas, has added an all new dimension to my social consciousness, a dimension which has brought me face to face with the harsh realities of a world which, when stripped naked of its artifice and duplicity, is as barbaric and brutal as ever...
They say life is like a river, a river that goes forever on and on- impetuous and full of energy at the beginning, slow and steady halfway down the mark and dull and dreary at the end. It goes various places and sees a great many things; what remains with it of that which it leaves behind are fragments, little bits here and there which finally settle down on the bed of unconsciousness...
"The road goes forever on and on
Down from the door where it began
And I must follow it if I can..."
-J.R.R. Tolkein
as 'Gandalf the Grey' in
his 'Fellowship of the Ring'
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