A deeply personal essay on the degree about to be gone past, and a final attempt at courting the essay form and being the Joan Didion of DU Beat one last time.
It has been three years. Let that sink in first.
Three years ago the world around us was struck by what will go down in history as a life-halting and soul-sucking pandemic. Freshly off my board examinations, like all students from my batch, I had dreams of making it big in this world. I too thought a liberal arts degree would equip me with words that would have the power to change the world around me and albeit propel me eventually towards a career in the liberal arts. However, the sudden imposition of the pandemic which immediately drove us within the four walls of our house seemed to indicate that I need to reconsider these choices.
At a time when my family was mourning for loved ones lost to the pandemic and finances seemed precariously perched, the obvious decision for me would have been to stick to a college in Kolkata, my hometown – and why not? There was an entire pool of prestigious institutions for me to choose from and one could always pick up the dream of moving out of your hometown for one’s postgraduate studies. To avoid giving my parents and family members weekly bouts of anxiety I even enrolled in a Kolkata college but everyone around me knew that my heart was not there. After a six month long wait that felt like an eternity when I got the merit list making it evident that I had indeed made it to one of the leading North Campus colleges in a degree I have wanted to pursue from the day I could think, I knew this was a decision I had to make. Back then, everyone around me seemed hesitant – is it really necessary? What was I trying to prove? But my guts said otherwise.
A year of online classes and two years of being in Delhi later, I am glad I stood my ground that night. Coming to the University of Delhi has not been the sweetest of experiences, but the bitterness that underlines this has now started lifting its head up in the form of a sweet melancholic nostalgia. With thirty days left for this degree to end, I look back on the years gone by and the moments of euphoria and heartbreak. I then look at the mirror (and trust me as a literature student freshly off Lacan that is difficult) and realise the person, or subject (yes I will crack Literature major jokes) is barely the lanky, long-haired boy who stepped into this institution so many moons back.
For one, this University puts you in place. And for good. Especially for a city-bred, English-educated man like me, buzz words like “Unity in Diversity” and “caste masquerading as class” became stark realities. Thrown into a liminal campus space where people of a host of disparate cultures not only lived together but often came into violent conflict with each other was a lesson in life. The spurious nature of identity politics left a stark impression upon me and while multiple friends and lovers became alien overnight, in the by-lanes of Gupta Chowk and Jawahar Nagar, I found my greatest lessons in kindness and empathy. You could be sharing a small plate of Malabar Biryani in Cafe Lucid all by yourself and the person sharing the table with you, suddenly strikes up a conversation and before you know it you have made a friend for the next set of semesters to come. You might be strolling down the ridge on a sultry evening and you will chance upon the sight of two lovers stealing moment, and you silently smile to yourself for this moment of rare affection that wasn’t yours to begin with you — but now is, because moments are meant to be borrowed and loaned, till you find yours.
During my tenure as an author for DU Beat, I have written on a wide range of subjects – ranging from student politics to cinema. But the one thing that I have continued advocating for and writing about relentlessly is issues pertaining to queerness and the queer experience. And on that note, in this final piece of mine, I wish to mention something. Loneliness is one of the biggest problems plaguing every student who lives on this campus on a daily basis. It is divorced from alone-ness and it is something that operates at a structural level. Its violence is less performative from the stone-pelting in protest marches and its cure amorphous. In fleeting moments it buries itself in the fists raised to the chant of azaadi and under the varying colours of the Pride flag. But it raises its uncanny head on metro rides where you see a stranger taking glitter off their jaws with tears in eyes and the person in tattered cargos as they scour your canteen for the millionth time with pamphlets people will stamp over in seconds.
The University of Delhi, and I never thought I would say this, is a family. Yes, because families are spaces with imbalance power dynamics. If there is anything I have learnt from these three arduous years it is this, there is nothing greater in this world than your truth and you alone and speak the same (Foucault says hello at this point) . If you choose to let this university teach you anything then let it be the urgent need and the requisite power required to speak this truth and claim your space. Be it a battle of queering the space, or gendering the discourse, or dismantling caste hierarchies. This is a place, and you belong, let no one tell you otherwise. For the ones who think the reality of the world begins when you step out of the bubble of your college, you are wrong. Aren’t you the real world in all earnest?
Anwesh Banerjee
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