savedubwp23admin, Author at DU Beat - Delhi University's Independent Student Newspaper

The residents of Meghdoot Hostel have expressed dismay upon their living conditions and have alleged that various arbitrary decisions have been taken by the authorities. The accusations have mostly been levelled against the former provost of the Hostel, Dr Pratibha Mehta Luthra, who has reportedly recently retired from her Hostel duties.

Meghdoot Hostel is one of the two University hostels for women in North Campus. It primarily admits masters and PhD students. It has been reported that after the pandemic, quite a few hostels were not well equipped to take in fresh students. In Meghdoot Hostel most students were admitted as guest residents and were asked to pay a higher fee. It has been alleged that there was complete lack of transparency in the admission process. The basis on which students were admitted into the hostel is unclear and whether university guidelines were followed is in question. Reportedly, a disproportionately high number of science students, particularly students from Dr B.R. Ambedkar Center for Biomedical Research – the institution in which the former provost is a faculty member-were given permanent seats.

Students who were not given a permanent seat were asked to vacate on a short notice. Those who were about to complete their courses requested for brief extensions so that they could be allowed to stay at the hostel until the completion of their courses. Most of these requests were denied. Asking students to vacate their rooms on a short notice caused immense disruption as many of them did not have any other place to stay.

“My dissertation submission was on the 15^th of June. I simply needed a 15-day extension. My application for extension was approved by the Department Head as well. Yet, the provost denied me an extension and refused to listen to my concerns” – a former resident of the hostel who wishes to remain anonymous

The former provost had reportedly undertaken the task of establishing a Saraswati idol in the Hostel premises. While the hostel often fell short of ensuring basic necessities for the residents, it was alleged that a considerable amount of the funds was spent in the establishment and maintenance of the idol. Multiple Hindu religious events such as havans and pujas were organised and it has been alleged that the students were coerced to participant in them. However, this has been refuted by a resident who stated that although religious gatherings and events were organised, attending them was a matter of choice. After the establishment of the idol, the hostel authorities stopped non-vegetarian food from being served in the mess. When this decision was met with complaints, the provost reportedly reasoned that non-vegetarian food cannot possibly be allowed in the hostel premises as the piety of the space had to be maintained due to the presence of the idol.

“We were repeatedly asked to participate in the events organised by the hostel. We were told that non participation in these events would affect our applications for permanents seats. Women from all over the country, from diverse cultures and different faiths, reside in our hostel. They were all asked to attend havans early in the morning. The prejudice that the provost had was very evident. – a resident of Meghdoot hostel who requested to remain anonymous

DU Beat contacted the members of the managing committee and the former provost to respond to the allegations.

“Thank you for kindly communicating with me on the matter. I held a meeting with the students on 2^nd June 2023 in the matter. The response from them has been communicated to the management committee. Everything has been done as per rule and based on the request from the students.” – Dr Pratibha Mehta Luthra, Provost, Meghdoot Hostel

Reportedly a new provost has been appointed to the hostel. The students hope that their concerns are taken care of with greater sincerity in future.

Featured image credits: Joon Square

DU Beat

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Campus Central

DU Sanctions Rs.110 Crore for Expansion of Central Library

By savedubwp23admin June 9, 2023

Delhi University is likely to soon inaugurate the construction works for the expansion of its central library. Simultaneously, the University has launched an e-book collection and digital archive system.

On June 6, Delhi University sanctioned a fund of Rs. 110 crore for the expansion of its central library, whose construction is expected to commence soon. The announcement was made at the launch of The Centenary E-Book Collection and Digital Archive by Prof. Yogesh Singh, Vice-Chancellor of the University, which aims at digitizing library resources and making them more accessible. According to DU officials, the collection has been expanded to include more than 83,000 e-books, digital archives, and subject collections from nine eminent publishers.

When the concept of e-journals came, many educationists were not comfortable with it, but now the mindset has changed. Today students find it very comfortable to read e-books and supplement it with their reading of printed books.

– Prof. Yogesh Singh, DU Vice Chancellor and Chief Guest at the e-book collection launch.

Adding that similar changes are required in the library system, the Vice-Chancellor also advised librarians of the University and colleges to undertake the organization of workshops to create awareness and knowledge about these updated amenities. He asserted that the internet has significantly altered workplace practices over the last 20–30 years, which requires complementary changes in the system.

India has emerged as the leading country in the world in UPI transactions. Things have to be changed in the system, similarly so that the library resources are accessible from anywhere.

-added the Vice-Chancellor

As stated by Dr. Rajesh Singh, the University Librarian and Head of the Delhi University Library System (DULS), the library system is a distributed system of resources and services spread across both campuses of the University possessing a remarkable collection of over 17 lakh documents consisting of books, print periodicals, monographs, theses, and other resources. He also mentioned that the University has acquired subject collections and digital archives from publishers such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Bloomberg, SAGE Publishing, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley Online Books.

As reported by the Hindustan Times, Prof. Rajeev Gupta, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Institution of Eminence (IoE), and Prof. Neeta Sehgal were also present during the centenary e-book launch.

Featured Image Credits: Aaj Tak

Manvi Goel

[email protected]

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Arts & Culture

The Beauty Facade : Instagram Trends

By savedubwp23admin June 18, 2022

Long gone are the days when Instagram was a way of connecting with forgotten friends. The contemporary face of Instagram has undergone a complete makeover. Read on to know more.

A name on everyone’s lips and imprinted on everyone’s mind; Instagram. A social media application that gained enormous popularity in the last decade, Instagram is all what one needs. From thrift stores to connecting with counsellors, this genie from Aladdin’s Lamp grants every wish of yours irrespective of the count. Ask a ‘millennial’ about their contact information and they will drop down their fancy usernames on Instagram. On a personal note, I know most of my followers through their usernames and not their real names. Such is the level of influence that Instagram has done on our lives. As if the sophistication wrapped around in the cloth of our lives was not enough; Instagram added more to the same.

As the title suggests, I am not here to elucidate and throw limelight on the good side of Instagram. I would not dare to state that it is completely absent. It is very much alive and kicking but let us keep it for some other article, shall we? Today, I am here to focus on an aspect that mostly hides itself under the tag ‘beauty’. An aspect that strives to be perfect but it is not. The aspect of toxicity prevailing in the current Instagram trends.

Wouldn’t the world be a better place if the social media trends were for mere fun and not people recklessly trying to prove themselves better?

–says Sayantani Singha from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata.

When it comes to myself, out of the 12 months in a year I am only active on Instagram for about a month if you could count the total number of days. This inactivity doesn’t arise from inborn dislikeness towards social media in general. The plant of dislike grew over time; getting nourished whenever I opened up my account. The dislike has turned into hatred now, if I have to be more precise. All thanks to Instagram’s recent brainchild, reels. Reels are those short 15 second clips that an user can upload for promoting their talents, delineating an amalgamation of scenic pictures from a trip, etcetera. It came in more like a substitute to another platform known as TikTok or Musically.

I don’t have a problem with reels in general. They are fun, I agree to the core. The problem arises at my end when it comes to certain trends that are spreading faster than fake news. Let me first talk about a current trend : “How did I go from this to this?” While some users are using this trend to show their artistic progression over the years, be it in the field of dance, music, make-up, etcetera; some are portraying puberty with the term ‘glow up’. If you ask my mother about the changes in my body or face, she’ll reply bluntly stating about puberty. But, the above stated trend degraded to such a level that individuals have started using their childhood photos and portray their so-called ‘glow-up’. Learning how to dress yourself better and apply cosmetics to beautify oneself does not mean glow up if we compare it with the times when we didn’t even know how to comb our hair. “Doechi, introduce yourself to the class” can be termed as the first trend’s sister. While some use it to portray the vivid makeup skills they possess, many are indulged in this puberty transformation itself.

There was a time when social media was a platform where we used to indulge in our free time, but now times have changed. Nowadays we free our time to indulge in social media. There is a recent trend that we can frequently see in our Instagram reels, that shows people’s transition from Anjali in kuch kuch hota hai to Poo in kabhi khushi kabhi gham. However in our real lives,this transition might be very opposite from these virtual glow ups we often see. We often suffer from body images of being too fat,too skinny or having bad skin and social media and its glorification of glow ups further worsens these issues. For I say,people evolve or grow up,we adapt to various external factors-we adapt ourselves to recent fashion trends,learn how to present ourselves in a proper manner and this isn’t a part of a glow up phenomenon but rather an adaptation due to growing up

— says Mridusmita Barman from Cotton University, Guwahati.

If the definition of glow-up is restricted to wearing fashionable clothes and make-up, I beg to differ from the same. For a person like me whose hands tremble due to nervousness while applying eyeliner, it’s difficult to relate with such trends. Also, not every individual grows up to have flawless skin and body. For some, their puberty comes with other uninvited guests like recurring acne problems, body issues, etcetera. I won’t be wrong if I say that my skin was much better during my childhood days even though I possessed zero fashion senses. I was better at a stage when insignificant things like Instagram did not make me feel inferior to my peers.

With unrealistic beauty standards introduced by these trends, Instagram is becoming a toxic platform. The stereotype hourglass figure of 36-24-36 inches, crystal clear skin where flowers might grow, a pointed Roman nose and what not. My hatred for Instagram comes from these reasons. Imagine how strong these influences are for teenage/ young adults like us that many even go for surgeries at this age itself. Certain instagram models and influencers have also ingrained their so-called perfections of stereotyped ‘beauty’ into the minds of young individuals to a large extent.

These days people are faking everything on Instagram just to keep the trend and meet the standards or so. I know one girl, she even got her eyelid surgery during 9th standard and now she is trying really hard to be like the perfectionists and all. However, this made her mentally depressed also. It’s very hard.

— Anonymous

As I scroll down and down through my Instagram feed, I realise that most of the individuals are living the life of their dreams. I get jealous, I won’t deny. Perfect bodies, perfect jawlines and the list goes on. But, as I delve deeper I realise this perfection is nothing more than a mirage. A facade as the title suggests. This is what one of my contacts shared and it goes like this : “Do you feel your body is fat, ugly, imperfect? Girl, this body of yours is keeping you alive during a deadly pandemic. Respect and love it.” Instagram is just a social media platform, don’t let it become your life.

Watch This : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDAGWy4s1Z8

Read Also : Social Media Depression

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Featured Image Credits : Jerk Magazine

Himasweeta Sarma

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DUB Speak

All You Who Sleep Tonight

By savedubwp23admin June 16, 2022

And the mid-sem break is finally upon us! For two years studying in the most prestigious public university of the country (terms and conditions applied) have entailed me telling my debatably more fortunate friends in private universities that my six month long semester now squeezed into four pathetically short months, flies by without a singular mid-semester break. Back in the days of Google Meet University, it did not really matter, since 8:30 classes were about switching on your laptop and falling asleep again (God bless all the people who figured out how to record lectures) as opposed to making your way through cow-dung in Old Gupta Colony and haggling with rickshaw-drivers over twenty bucks.

At the stag end of my degree, the promise and fruition of a well earned semester break is nothing short of enticing. But even as I groan over all the pictures of my hometown decked in glorious lights, all set to don the garb of an open art gallery for ten days, I realise there are among my peers who will not go home during this break and juniors who will not be able to go home. Attendance sucks really. Having exhausted medical claims for lazy Wednesdays and hungover Fridays, people find themselves now faced with the risk of staking five full marks at the cost of returning home for festivities.

But it is moments such as these that make me wonder truly what it means to be an outstation kid in this lonely little city during festival week? We all come away from our homes with suitcases packed with dreams which can never be appropriately weighted by airport authorities. We come with hopes that are beyond the beeps of securities at transit. We look for houses, negotiate rents, put up with scheming landlords and adjust our intestines to the atrocious fare that is served in the name of daily food. In the end, we find our own corners, deck them up with fairy lights, save up for Alexa and make it our goal to purchase fresh flowers at least once a week. You know a city is unkind when the price of chrysanthemums makes you rummage your pockets to check if you have enough for dinner later, and you settle for the familiarity of white peeling tuberoses.

But soon we realise that for houses to become homes, they must pass the litmus test of establishing unconscious hierarchies with which come inevitable power dynamics. Dynamics that bring with them the quiet company of many heartbreaks and disappointments. Eventually you are left straddling the remnants of a home back where you came from – a home that grows seemingly distant with every passing day – and the burden of making peace with the home you promised to build yourself here. Oftenstance, situations arise when the need to anchor oneself leaves one feeling even more vulnerable, and we assume the hybrid identity of outliers – neither here nor there. Neither able to go back in full throttle nor able to make peace with the newness of where we are now. Festivals don’t help either.

In a search of making sense of an existence this deeply in a moment of flux, we often find ourselves longing to go back to the warm glaze of a city waking up to colours and words of joy on a festival of homecoming. We find ourselves craving the sweets that Maa would make in the kitchen – samples to be nibbled at, the actual specimen only made available when the guests arrived. At that moment the journey of coming to the big city becomes an exercise in meaning-making and fighting urges to not succumb to the comfort of familiarity in the most unfamiliar of circumstances.

To all the people who will not be returning home for your festivals this mid-sem break, because of you have heartbreaks to tell your pillow about, playlists of crushes to hear on loop, professional disappointments to cope with and peace to be made with waning family ties, I loan a few words of Vikram Seth. he writes, “All you who sleep tonight, far from the ones you love…. The whole world shares your tears, Some for two nights or one, And some for all their years.”

Anwesh Banerjee
[email protected]

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Arts & Culture

Film Criticism: Of Subjectivity and Stars

By savedubwp23admin August 18, 2021

A brief outlay of what goes into perceiving film criticism as one of the most misunderstood and least credited forms of entertainment journalism

Entertainment journalism is probably the least taken seriously category of journalism in most mainstream discourses on the same. People diss it off in terms of it being something that works primarily on exercising unsolicited opinions. Film critics specifically are called people whose failure at being professionals of cinema led to them choosing lives as critics who find it inherently impossible to break upon the scene as real artists. To warrant a ‘positive’ review the film itself needs to emerge from a certain generic space – preferably indie – whereas those belonging to genres more mainstream will always remain sidelined in terms of the adulaton they receive from critics (clearly people don’t read reviews coming out of film festivals).

In a post-paparazzi world, the act of recording itself has been essentially reduced to its barest levels whereby entire film reviews are just sent out through character limited tweets are limited to a string of adjectives which are incoherently strung together to create what could only be possibly labelled as a mood piece gone horribly wrong. There is much less consideration of film criticism as an evolved form of journalism that requires an in-depth understanding of the material at hand – not only on a narrative level but also in terms of technicalities such as editing, cinematography and sound – to name a few. The dilution of entertainment criticism is also largely owing to the social media boom where every person not only has an opinion but also a space to offer that opinion at; and hence opinions – mostly under-researched and unfounded, start masquerading as ‘reviews’ with no credibility.

Over the years a variety of outstanding critics (sadly mostly Western) have made their mark in the field by developing styles unique to themselves such as the balanced, seemingly objective outlook of someone like Roger Ebert, displaying a child-like joy and enjoyment of the medium as opposed to someone like Pauline Kael who took a much personal, feisty and passionate look at every film she reviewed turning her reviews of the films into as deeply personal experiences as the film itself.

Another massive negating point of film criticism is the lack of appreciating subjective standpoints. While on grounds of technicality one can take an objective stance and comment on badly edited sequences of out-of-sync sound sequences – the final response to film as a piece of art is something that is deeply individual and subjective. 2001: A Space Odyssey termed by Ebert as one of the greatest films ever made is undoubtedly two hours of technical brilliance but I am allowed to espouse my opinion with regard to how deeply boring I found the film.

Which brings us to the question of rating films. It is very easy to end an opinion piece on any film we see with a string of stars lying at the end like a discarded appendage without an universal metric system to ensure that star ratings are uniform. While people reduce the reviews to their final star ratings to have an essential understanding of the critic’s viewpoint they fail to realise that the existence of the star rating is perhaps the most subjective derivative of the act of film criticism. As Shah Rukh Khan had famously said in the first edition of the FCCA, why must our film experiences be akin to five star hotels? Can’t we do better than this?

Anwesh Banerjee

[email protected]

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Arts & Culture

Film Criticism: Of Subjectivity and Stars

By savedubwp23admin August 18, 2021

A brief outlay of what goes into perceiving film criticism as one of the most misunderstood and least credited forms of entertainment journalism

Entertainment journalism is probably the least taken seriously category of journalism in most mainstream discourses on the same. People diss it off in terms of it being something that works primarily on exercising unsolicited opinions. Film critics specifically are called people whose failure at being professionals of cinema led to them choosing lives as critics who find it inherently impossible to break upon the scene as real artists. To warrant a ‘positive’ review the film itself needs to emerge from a certain generic space – preferably indie – whereas those belonging to genres more mainstream will always remain sidelined in terms of the adulaton they receive from critics (clearly people don’t read reviews coming out of film festivals).

In a post-paparazzi world, the act of recording itself has been essentially reduced to its barest levels whereby entire film reviews are just sent out through character limited tweets are limited to a string of adjectives which are incoherently strung together to create what could only be possibly labelled as a mood piece gone horribly wrong. There is much less consideration of film criticism as an evolved form of journalism that requires an in-depth understanding of the material at hand – not only on a narrative level but also in terms of technicalities such as editing, cinematography and sound – to name a few. The dilution of entertainment criticism is also largely owing to the social media boom where every person not only has an opinion but also a space to offer that opinion at; and hence opinions – mostly under-researched and unfounded, start masquerading as ‘reviews’ with no credibility.

Over the years a variety of outstanding critics (sadly mostly Western) have made their mark in the field by developing styles unique to themselves such as the balanced, seemingly objective outlook of someone like Roger Ebert, displaying a child-like joy and enjoyment of the medium as opposed to someone like Pauline Kael who took a much personal, feisty and passionate look at every film she reviewed turning her reviews of the films into as deeply personal experiences as the film itself.

Another massive negating point of film criticism is the lack of appreciating subjective standpoints. While on grounds of technicality one can take an objective stance and comment on badly edited sequences of out-of-sync sound sequences – the final response to film as a piece of art is something that is deeply individual and subjective. 2001: A Space Odyssey termed by Ebert as one of the greatest films ever made is undoubtedly two hours of technical brilliance but I am allowed to espouse my opinion with regard to how deeply boring I found the film.

Which brings us to the question of rating films. It is very easy to end an opinion piece on any film we see with a string of stars lying at the end like a discarded appendage without an universal metric system to ensure that star ratings are uniform. While people reduce the reviews to their final star ratings to have an essential understanding of the critic’s viewpoint they fail to realise that the existence of the star rating is perhaps the most subjective derivative of the act of film criticism. As Shah Rukh Khan had famously said in the first edition of the FCCA, why must our film experiences be akin to five star hotels? Can’t we do better than this?

Anwesh Banerjee

[email protected]

Keep Reading