Latest
DU Beat – Delhi University's Independent Student Newspaper
Tag

College life

Browsing
DUB Speak

The Reality of College Life: Fresher’s Edition

By

After the initial week of jitters and anxiety finishes, faces start to become familiar and the freshers’ no longer need to ask three people for directions to their classrooms. Here’s looking at college life, through the eyes of a fresher.

 Somewhere between metro rides, attending lectures half-asleep and making innumerable plans to meet at the nearest chai tapri each day, college life for the most recent batch has kick-started. And it is exultingly unexpected and exhausting at the same time. High school puts most of us in a sheltered and protective delusion where one is far away from the finer nuances and greater responsibilities of adulting.

My initial experience of college life at the North Campus of the University of Delhi (DU) has been liberating and eye-opening. The diverse spectrum of students, the dynamics of an all-girls institution and the ever-lasting juggle between academics and co-curricular activities forms the entire experience of college which continues to teach me something new every day.

The college has become a stepping-stone of unlearning for me. The judgments, opinions, norms, realities, and conditions that I was exposed to earlier, have all been rethought. The political protests, opinionated teachers, vocal classmates, and active media on campus have exposed me to broader perspectives, new ways of thinking and encouraged me to look at things through a fresh lens.

Satviki Sanjay, a first-year student of B.A (Honours) Philosophy from Miranda House says, “Despite popular belief, going to college in DU is so much more than just “chilling”. It gives you the much-needed space to work on your interests and your area of study, which was not possible in school. Being at the University gives you freedom but at the same time, it teaches you the idea of being responsible for yourself. For me, the most enriching experience so far has been meeting different people in numerous societies and being exposed to varying opinions.”

The diverse and democratic environment of the University has exposed me to its rich legacy and heritage. It has already pushed me to put my best foot forward, push myself, make the most of the opportunities at hand and get out of my comfort zone. Like me, many first-years are looking forward to the next three years of college and live by the motto – “Sleep more than you study, study more than you party, party as much as you can!”

Feature Image Credits: DU Beat

Bhavya Pandey

[email protected]

Keep Reading
By
Campus Central

What College Taught Me: From the Eyes of a First-Year Student

By

With this semester, the first-year of college comes to an end for many students. Let’s take a look at the learnings of a first-year student.

  • Exposure and Experience

The first year of college is an eye-opener to the real world, it gives you a view of adulthood and brings along a sense of independence. It doesn’t come easy to many, makes life difficult for a few, and lonely for others. But what it does give you is exposure and experience to cure that gaping hole of leaving your home, friends, school, and your city behind. An outstation student of the University said “Yeh Delhi ne toh meri Lucknow ki saari Nawabi hi nikal di, Kahan main vaha maze mein ghoomti thi, aur yahan auto vaalon se dus-dus rupaye ke liye ladti hoon (Delhi has taken away all the Lucknow royalty from me, I used to a carefree child. Here, in Delhi, I have to fight with the auto-rickshaw drivers for INR 10)” She agrees that college life has transformed her to become a better version of herself. She is able manage her finances well.

  • Friends and Family

Himanika Agarwal from Gargi College commented, “Everybody used to tell me that you never find real friends in college, even I used to believe that. But Glass Eye, the Film Making Society of Gargi College has given me some of the best friends I have ever had, who have now become my family.” In the first-year itself, you find your close group of friends who become your family and confidants, be it your classmates or the members of your college society, college helps you to find people who you remember all throughout.

  • Fests and Euphoria

The cultural fests organised by the University of Delhi (DU) colleges is another enlightening experience for the students. Fresh out of taking the first semester examinations, students attend fests with their ‘college gang’ looking up wide eyed at the glittering lights of concerts and competitions, breathing in the chaos, and adapting to the crowds.

My first-year, personally, gave me The Local Train, another staple name associated with the DU fests. This musical band and their brand of music, their lyrics, and the performances are worth it. Another student added, “I can easily say that my checklist for a happening college life ticked off with after attending Vishal-Shekhar’s concert at Mecca, the cultural fest of Hindu College.”

  • The ability to study overnight

College is not only fun and games, academics also play an important role. This involves projects, class presentations, reviews, internals, and exams. These conclusively teach every student to study or make a presentation a night before the submission. This might be unhealthy, but it is a fact.

  • A new perspective

Above all, for me, the first-year of college worked as a stepping stone in the process of unlearning patriarchal norms and misogynistic conditioning, we as naïve little kids were subjected to, throughout our childhood. Classroom discussions with strong opinionated teachers, debates with your peers and seniors, revolutionary texts and readings, interactions about the rights of the LGBTQ community, these have changed my perspective for the better. Looking back, I can now remember instances in the past which were problematic, but I didn’t realise earlier. These realisations are my achievements of gaining new and better ideologies and of becoming a more ‘woke’ individual.

Feature Image Credits: DU Beat

 

Sakshi Arora

[email protected]

Keep Reading
By
Campus Central

This isn’t a Fairy Tale, Don’t Lock Me in an Ivory Tower

By

The freedom to loiter, occupy public spaces post 9 p.m., and see how our campus looks at midnight is a luxury and experience that women students are denied.

Earlier last week, women from Daulat Ram College (DRC) Hostel protested in front of the Vice Chancellor’s office demanding the removal of members of the hostel administration who infringed their privacy and policed their choices. The protests barely affected the administration.
As a student journalist, this development didn’t surprise me. A year ago, I was pursuing a story on hostel in-timings. Both Miranda and DRC had strict hostel timings that were religiously enforced. In contrast, when I spoke to the evening shift guard of Kirori Mal College Hostel, he breezily mentioned how he lets the boys come late if it’s a friend’s birthday or allows them to go out at midnight if they are hungry. This casual remark hit me very personally as having lived in a hostel the last three years, I know I would not be allowed to go out after 10 p.m., no matter whose birthday it was or how hungry I was.
Most women’s hostels and paying guest accommodations have an actual metal grill gate that is shut and locked at 10 p.m. and opened again at 7 a.m. before classes. Why would a good woman be out between these ungodly hours anyway? We are quite literally locked inside brick, mortar, and metal, sometimes without a fire exit. Our moral guardians like to believe that these in-timings don’t interfere with our education. Attending lectures is a luxury we
are allowed and anything beyond lectures though is curtailed by these timings. They ensure that there are no parties, no midnight walks at India Gate, no unplanned trips, and no chai at 1 a.m. We are quite literally modern
Cinderellas, as the clock strikes 10 our facade of empowerment and emancipation falls apart, like a badly
stitched polyester dress after one little rip. I particularly detest the social media forwards that urge men to respect women “because she is someone’s wife, daughter, sister, and mother” but make no mention of the fact that she is human and deserves to have her autonomy respected. I wonder if we will ever live in a space that does not restrict
us to these roles alone. It is exhausting to rise and set with the sun, to rush home as the clock ticks 9, sweating frantically as I lose my patience as the clock ticks closer to the deadline. It is high time the University administration let go of this facade of hostel in-timings. If we are old enough to vote, old enough to get married, then we are old enough to decide when to stay in and when to go out.

The scam that hostel in-timings keep women safe from harassment is the biggest lie. If there were certainty that I would never be harassed if I never set foot after 9, I would be willing to pay the price. But these so-called
pretenders who appear to care about our safety are the same people who avert their eyes as they see a man elbow a woman’s breasts in the metro. To say that you should stay in and protect yourself from rapists is the ultimate form of victim blaming. It implies that the responsibility of protecting oneself from harassment lies with the victim. It says that if you stay indoors then the perpetrator can find another victim, probably one out later at night, less covered up, and less sober.

The three years of college life are often the first time when girls get to move beyond their house. College life allows considerable time for youngsters to experiment, roam around, and have the first taste of freedom. These are
the days that people recount as they regale about the risks they took, the weddings they gate crashed,
hours they killed while doing nothing, etc. But when you deny someone to loiter or even run errands for 10 hours every day then you are essentially denying them the opportunity to have fun. A sight of girls carelessly singing songs
at Sudama Tea Point past 8 p.m. is a revolutionary imagery. It may be nothing for the guys, but the girls still
dream of loitering, just existing outside.

Kinjal Pandey
[email protected]

Keep Reading
By
Offbeat

Are the Students of Delhi University Ready to Swipe Right?

By

Find out the popular opinion of students on Tinder and if it can help you find love?

While school life is usually lived in a bubble, college opens our avenues and outlooks. One such outlook is on relationships. We realise dating in school was much different and most of us open up to the prospect of finding a special someone. Being in the University of Delhi, with the upcoming fest season and the dreaded Valentine’s week, puts the thought of wanting to be with our sweetheart even more to the forefront.
One way to achieve that goal, is through Tinder. Most of the students we spoke to suggested that ‘curiosity’ was one of the major reasons to join Tinder, with the slightest possibility of finding someone worthwhile, while others named ‘insistence by their friends’ or being ‘bored’ as reasons. The beginners are apprehensive to join it because of the fear of being ‘seen’ by someone they know or the perpetual haunt of their parents finding out.
Diya, a student from Kamala Nehru College says, “Most people do not expect anything and just try it out to see what is so great about it?” This resonates with most of the reasons for joining Tinder- its hype. Online dating, and not just Tinder, does raise the question of safety and trust. Before swiping, individuals have to try and judge the character of the person with just a bio and few images. Sanjula, another student of Kamala Nehru College responds, “There are certain risks, of course, to online dating as a whole, but if you use it judiciously, and cautiously use what is given, then why not?”
While there are a variety of experiences people have had, on talking about bad experiences, there is no denying that some people do make crass and awkward ‘moves’ which can often be very upsetting and unsettling. I feel that is the biggest red flag for your army of cupids to retreat. There are instances when conversations receive insensitivity and entitlement to a response.

Discussions on finding love and not being lonely run on parallels with Tinder. One cannot negate the possibility of the former because there are also people who have discovered partners with a mental and emotional connection. While relationships are not an answer to loneliness, the experience of putting yourself out there and meeting new people can make one feel less lonely. As the student of Delhi University, Yashika says, “It may not be a guarantee but in this millennial age, why not?”
Moving on to the idea of casual flings, something Tinder has frequently been associated with; it has led to a notion
where people are mutually free from commitments or ties, free to explore their sexuality, or simply add some
spice to their lives!

Lastly, casual or serious, strings or no strings, younger people are opening up to the complexities of human relationships and their likes and dislikes, just make sure one does not hurt someone else on this journey and respects boundaries. In today’s time, people have the liberty to mutually and consensually decide the rules of their own relationships. So go on and swipe!

Feature Image Credits: Dating Scout

Shivani Dadhwal
[email protected]

Keep Reading
By
Your Beat

The Dilemma: Is it the Right Age?

By

“It is the right time now.” “There’s a right age for everything.” How often have we heard these lines? But does it really matter?

With the last semester having begun for several students of the University of Delhi, now comes the phase of thinking and exploring the options ahead with a little bit of worrying. Some may plan to go for their masters, others may look for jobs, or pursue their interests. Be it travel, read, or just relax. Some might be in a hurry to get their careers on track, so that they do it on the ‘right time’. But what is this ‘right time’ that we and our parents too run for?

The right time to start college, the right time to start a job, the right time to settle down, the right time to marry, to have kids – is there really a defined marker for this?

I know plenty of peers who want to go in for a different subject study after their graduation but are hesitant to do so. This is because they feel it is not the right time to start a bachelor’s degree again. Some are skeptical to take the step for their hobbies and passion. Others feel it is too late to start learning the drums he always wanted because it’s the time to look for a job. Who put this timeline over our heads, I’d like to ask?
It’s the fear of lagging behind our peers, that has been inculcated and imbibed in us by the society that comes to hinder
our path of pursuing things we like. The fear of missing out (FOMO), the closest millennial term that would describe it. When 3:30 p.m. in Canada right, it’s 1 a.m. in India. All of us are treading our lives according to our own timelines. It doesn’t mean that one is ahead of other. It’s just that things happen when they are supposed to.

However cliché it may sound, but age is just a number. Some start college at 21, some start working at 15. There is no comparison there. The only thing that matters is that you check off the boxes on your bucket list. The right time or the perfect moment is when you decide to make it. Sometimes, it might not be as soon as you wanted, or may come earlier than you expected it to. All this depends on you and your efforts. So, do things when you want them to; start a new hobby, start a new course, travel the country, take up the job you wished for, start interning under the mentor you look up to. Begin when you feel is correct. Keep cutting cakes every year and enjoy your ‘right age’ decided by you.

Feature Image Credits: Prachi Mehra

Gurleen Kaur
[email protected]

Keep Reading
By
DUB Speak

Semester VI – Taking Things The Way They Come

By

We talk about the many anxieties of a sixth- semester student, enveloped in placements, entrance exams, and last days’ blues.

“Be what you want to be, taking things the way they come” goes an old Bacardi jingle. This is one of the many iconic tunes that can be good advice to anyone at any point of their lives; except perhaps students in their board year, or a first-year student trying to squeeze into relevance in college, or a third-year student navigating across placements and interviews, or an adult struggling to “adult”. You get the gist, the simple advice of taking one day at a time is too uncomplicated to be truly helpful. Isn’t it? Life, as we know it is so very complicated, with each so-called “last battle” giving way to another and just when you thought you were done navigating the unknown, an ocean of uncertainty materialises. According to the wisdom of someone who has been on this earth for all of 20 years, the feeling that success at each and every step is the be-all and end-all of making it in life, that not meeting a particular milestone satisfactorily would mean the untimely death of all our goals, is universal. But our life goals, the person we want to be and the things we want to do are certain things that can be achieved in multiple ways.

The anxieties of a third-year student, accompanied by the desire to make the most out of college in terms of personal experience, with a dash of urge to take a trip with friends, to do justice to the society you started out with, the urge to attend all your classes one last time, and to stroll every lane on campus, drink cups of chai with everyone you met, loved, and lost. The notion of “ek baar aur” (one more time) can be overwhelming. The bottom line is, we want it
all. Living our best life with one’s friends, doing justice to our hobbies, activities and organisations where we
are now in leadership roles, excelling academically, and this overstimulation of hope and expectations is overburdening and is the perfect recipe to make us give it all up and accomplish none of it. The pressure of everything, combined with the ridiculously high expectations we set for ourselves, are exhausting. Between the mock tests and entrance examinations are given till now, semester exams that we just wrapped up, and everything else that seems to be coming up, I wonder whether we will find the time to sit in the college lawns with friends without once worrying about one entrance exam or another. The line where you live life to the fullest versus being negligent towards your goals is a thin one, even harder to demarcate since college students live without the pressures that come with employment and adulthood. So how does one navigate his space that is full to the brim, with nostalgia, excitement, fear, freedom, ambition, and other hundreds of emotions I cannot put into words? The only solution that comes to mind is to keep taking one day at a time. The iconic Francis Assisi quote, “Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible” seems like the wholesome advice that allows us to work on our goals, no matter how huge, without getting overwhelmed.
There will still be days when we might fail miserably – oversleep, binge-watch and eat, not take certain entrance exams seriously, and have major regrets later. We must accept that our “human-ness” would make at least a few mistakes along this journey. However, one ought to remember that making mistakes does not give us the
licence to quit altogether. After all, falling down nine times and getting up the tenth is the foundation of the human spirit (along with being the chorus of a loved Cardi B song).
This new year, remember that we are humans, and our failure is neither our defining characteristic nor is it permanent (unless we want it to be). As an unsure student in my last semester, unaware of where I will be and what I will do in the next six months, the only advice I would like to give myself and you are – “be what you want to be,
taking things the way they come.”

Kinjal Pandey
[email protected]

Keep Reading
By
Your Beat

It’s Not Your Job to Fix Others

By

Trying to fix someone refers to whole-heartedly taking up their problems, and trying to fix it for them. It almost
feels like living their life on their behalf. Seemingly selfless, this practice can be toxic. So unless you are Coldplay,
don’t go out there, and say the F word.

One of the main reasons why we feel obligated to fix others is because we feel that we have the ‘outsider’s perspective’ on their lives. We believe that the person concerned is too involved in the problem to see all the sides, and hence, the prospective solutions. Or we might feel that the person is too afraid of the negative outcomes of the
problem at hand, that, they fail to act properly and give it a fair solution.

Loving someone and fixing them are two different things.

What we need to understand is that we can not be there for everyone all the time. There will be a time when a person would have to solve a problem on their own and they might end up blaming your absence as the reason for their
problems. You need to let go of the necessity to fix the lives of others, in order to be happy yourself and
letting other people be happy in their lives as well.
Through unrelenting guilt, the burden of other’s troubles goes to add on to our own misery. Often, we find ourselves in this moral dilemma; how appropriate is our indulgence, and how helpful is our concern for the well-being of others. An important observation is that lending an ear is often helpful, but having heard something, it is
not always the best option to offer advice. As relatable you may find the situation to be, you cannot ever possibly live through it like the person actually struggling with it. Your failure at not being able to ‘fix’ someone is not a marked disability. Experience will inform you that toxicity becomes evident when the self is strained. When the experience of others becomes too taxing for your mental health and physical health, it is time to distance yourself. It is often felt that kind people can be trusted with traumas. “Maybe she will have something wise to say about this,” you might
think, and approach a listener. But how often do you take someone’s permission, or seek their consent to indulge them in a conversation that can possibly put all the ideals of the listener to question? We all could adapt to this habit, gradually.
When the external problems start affecting the internal self, it is your cue to be on your guard. Then, you abandon your friend? Abandonment is easily an escape from your own conscience. You cannot act as a professional psychologist or a therapist, and you should not.
College life is full of exquisite experiences as it is of turbulent traumas. It always helps to find an ear, but never to fully rely on it. You can be this ear to someone. But overburdening yourself with the obligation of fixing someone else’s life would amount to nothing but disallowing yourself pace and calm. Maybe we could learn to say, “Let the lights guide you home, it is not my job to fix you.”

Feature Image Credits: Flickr

Khyati Sanger
[email protected]
Kartik Chauhan
[email protected]

Keep Reading
By
DUB Speak

School To College: The Transformation

By

Change is the routine in our lives. Every day changes us, every experience and every interaction. College, most definitely is the perfect pedestal that induces a transformation.

Learning is a procedure, one that works in a circle. Just as you begin to feel that you have learnt a lesson, another excites you. But an important part of learning is the act of unlearning. Some transitions in the act of learning come to you as a first. But every now and then, you learn something that makes you want to question your prior knowledge of the matter. And that is precisely what makes this process an adventure.

A wondrous upheaval of sorts becomes a reality in college. We have all grown up in a systematised structure of our respective schools. From convent schools to arya-samajik schools, the diversity in our schools converges at more than one point. All schools prohibit use of mobile phones, for instance. We all will agree that schools, in one way or the other, impose on us a great burden to conform with a lot of rules and regulations. Our teachers claimed the true purpose of these ideal behaviors and manners readied us for a more sophisticated life ahead. But colleges are different. Professors will not criticise you for your mohawk, not openly at least.

My friend Sanchi Mehta, a third-year Literature student at Hindu College captures the transformation from school to college in a symbolic analogy. “The transition can be summarised as the symbolic shift from the stiflingly homogeneous uniform to a flitting, self fashioned attire, consciously choosen everyday until the point where one breaks free from these shackles of both overt or insidious determination to lounge in their favourite pair of jeans (or pyjamas),” says Sanchi. This is how growth can be routed in our decision making process once we access the endless possibilities in college. Everything matters, everything that you choose to affect your actions.

The Bollywood idea of college is far from real. In fact, it is just the opposite. Not everything makes perfect sense, not everything is compulsorily fancy. College is a smattering of crises and joys. And pointedly, there is often a balance between the two. The exclusivity of college-crises is evident in the realisation that here, these crises are dealt with a more serious individuality. Help is available, but unlike schools, where our teachers interacted more personally, in college, you have to reach out to the help. This is empowering as well as challenging, I feel. But this is the essence of college as well. Through these struggles come the brightest chances and opportunities. In college, spontaneity in decision-making and activity is not a pressing issue. In fact, in due course, it becomes the very sustenance of life in college- spontaneity.

Personally, I feel that college has been a metamorphosis. It is as Chahak Gupta, President of the Literary Society of Hindu College states, “The metamorphosis of an individual nourished with the fodder of conformity into someone who breaks away from the cocoon and embraces the world of subjectivity and difference.”

Prior to entering college we are allowed a very limited liberty. The experiences in school shape us for the experiences in life, truly, but not without limiting our thinking processes too. The embracing of this world of subjectivity and difference poses a challenge to us for this reason. We are too familiar with accepting definitions, that it becomes a challenge to delineate differences and diversities in them. It is the free-thinking atmosphere of college that proves conducive to such growth of our perspectives.

It is this metamorphosis that I have lived through, in this short span of college. And the most promising prospect to me is that there is a lot of growth that needs tapping still.

 

Feature Image Credits: Odyssey

Kartik Chauhan
[email protected]

Keep Reading
By
DUB Speak

End of semester: How time flies and the importance of self-reflection

By

It seems like the idiom ‘time flies’ has never been truer. With college, extra-curriculars, and the ever-present technology, we always have something to do and are never truly alone with ourselves.

 

It may seem to many of us that the semester just began, and in what seemed like the blink of an eye, it is over. We tend to be so occupied in building our future, that we forget to live in our present. It is a relentless process of looking at the forthcoming adventures, which never hurts, and is, in fact, a great thing to do.

But, we need to reflect on ourselves. Keep a constant check on whether what we are doing is giving us joy. Often, there is an inexplicable sadness that accompanies people our age. It is okay to have emotions and be as vulnerable as is humanly possible but don’t get scorched by a flame that is not worthy of it.

Our thoughts are our feelings, and if we don’t organize, divide and label our thoughts, we never understand how we feel. We keep going on about life, shoving all of our opinions aside, robotically. But that goes against human-nature, hence the sadness. We hope that tomorrow will bring something better along with it, but we never actually think our way through.

Careers, relationships, budgets, these all are the things that need to be looked into and given a quality-check frequently. And this is to be done alone!

‘Alone’ is a word that most people fear, but shouldn’t. With the ease of commute, travel and communication, modern humans are never truly alone, and have a certain phobia of the concept. But we need to learn to be friends with ourselves, to enjoy our own company. We need to talk to ourselves, we are our best judges.

What I would suggest is sit and look back on what you did this semester; where you were when it started, and how far have you come? Then imagine where you want to see yourself in the next 10 years. All the things that you are doing right now, which are in line with your ‘ideal future-self’, keep doing them and get rid of all the wasteful things. It is important to clean the shelves, wipe off the dust, and create a clean space within. And then, make self-reflection a habit!

 

Image caption: Importance of self-reflection.

Image credits: The Social Rush

 

 

Maumil Mehraj

[email protected]

 

Keep Reading
By
DUB Speak

A College Procrastinator

By

A fable elucidating the ordeals of an incorrigible procrastinator who seldom adheres to his quotidian activities with the alacrity expected of him.

The alarm buzzes menacingly in the distance as the hunky-dory dream comes to an impetuous conclusion. You scramble within the confines of your sheets to awkwardly grab your cellphone as the cadence of the alarm tone pendulously and with celerity drops between alternate highs and lows. No sooner than the alarm is switched off than it dawns upon you that you’ve overslept: an asperity-marked indictment of your nocturnal cellphone-skittering tendencies. You scramble out of the sheets, muttering incomprehensible bilge bemoaning your incorrigible traits, and rush to complete the quotidian ablution in a slapdash manner, another perennial bone of contention between you and your parents.

You quail with mild pain and shudder as the first drops of the frosty shower water make unremitting fusillades on your naked body. The shampoo is grabbed awkwardly, as are the shower gel and the loofah, as the sloughing process is initiated in a manner that shall put the envious blitzing pace of the erstwhile World War Two era German Army to shame. As you grab hold of your senses and exit the washroom, change your clothes, and hastily make your way to the dining table, you realize that you’re facing an immense paucity of time, and that shall likely result in you skipping your meal, despite the vociferous protestations from your famished stomach. The stomach growls in a minatory manner, while you’re stuck between Scylla and Charybdis: either have a hearty breakfast and risk irking the professor by arriving at his lecture late, or skip the breakfast only to rue the decision later when you writhe on the floor with intense agony and regret. You opt for the former, immensely aware of the fact that your mendacious nature has never let you shy away from furnishing a flimsy and lousy excuse to the professor justifying your characteristic tardiness.
The breakfast is gulped with remarkable ferventness, a manifestation of your peckish temperament, as you baulk over your unflappable callousness towards academic ventures and adherence to a rigid deadline, which results in you seldom incurring the praise and encomium of your surly professors, who have anointed you as an object of ridicule and derision.
No sooner are you done devouring your breakfast like a madman than you’re impetuously jolted out of your somnolence. The backpack is grabbed, and the customary farewells are uttered as you sprint boisterously to the metro station, only to encounter a serpentine queue of commuters at the frisking station bemoaning their doomed fates. You mutter invectives reproaching your obstreperous nature as the queue dawdles ahead. You rush to the platform, hoping to find a train rolling into the station as soon as you enter only to find the station eerily empty. The display board is citing a long wait time. Your blinkered outlook is finally reaping dividends as you repeatedly curse your damned unpropitious nature by hurling a spree of coarse vituperatives directed at yourself.
A deafening honk arouses you out of your self-deprecating tirade yet again as the train rolls into the platform. You scramble to your feet as you take a perfunctory glance at your watch: the lecture must’ve commenced. That shall remain incontrovertible. The professor scrupulously adheres to the stipulated schedule. The doors of the metro open as a torrent of commuters briskly make their way inside, only for you to stumble upon a multitude of commuters already packed into the cloistered confines of the metro. You flail your arms, jostle within the sequestered space, and wedge yourself between a snarky quadragenarian undergoing a mid-life crisis and a sprightly teenager engaged in a telephonic conversation.
As the metro hurtles through, you reminisce over your fait accompli, your diminishing grades, and a chimerical social life, which is in disarray. Before you end up scripting your eventual demise, the metro comes to a screeching halt at your station, and you hastily gather your belongings and disembark.
You hail an erickshaw, and slouch on the seat as it zooms past the oncoming traffic, evoking a shudder or two as it brushes close to some precarious collisions. Even before the erickshaw comes to a complete stop at the college, you jump off and sprint to the college entrance, flash your ID to the pesky guards whose Brobdingnagian hubris might even flummox Narcissus, and dash towards the lecture hall. A few close shaves with stationary souls induce panic as you eventually run out of breath before slumping outside the lecture complex. A languid peek at the watch is taken yet again: you’re thirty minutes late. You mumble the concocted excuse again while opening the gate to only be perplexed by the sight awaiting you: the lecture hall is eerily dark and devoid of any souls, desolate and cold.
You fumble in your pockets and fish out your cellphone to scour for messages on the class group. “Classes have been scrapped,” so goes the message, as your countenance contorts into an amalgam of despair and choleric revulsion.
You concede defeat, trot across to the cafeteria with a despondent disposition, and slump on the nearest chair while cursing your imperiled life.

 

Image Credits: Being Indian

Adeel Shams

[email protected]

Keep Reading
By