The red glistening walls housing the dreams of lacs of students also house within themselves heaps of issues that wait for the dust to be removed from their face.
When these issues lie on the surface waiting to be scratched upon, the onus falls on student organisations, activists and journalists.
For the part of student journalists, what goes on behind a published report? Just the protest or the issue at hand or loads of trashy politics and games of hushing. The search for quotes to provide legitimacy for the piece is a search like no other. To be ignored at the whim of others is not a new thing, but to be restrained from writing was a completely new experience for a writer that came to me as a student journalist.
What irked me the most in the initial days was the deliberate silence of almost all of my teachers on the very issues that concerned them. The shock came with a strict message from the administration to not to consult any teacher directly for any issue. The next experience that awaited me was from the very society that I worked for which tried to restrain an article about the misconduct of society members towards the outstation students.
With each passing report, the politics of the backend became more twisted and turned. From people restraining us from reporting upon the publicly available information to organisations keeping their solidarity private for the show of some people, I saw the ‘dark’ that resides in the red bricks.
Just like the objects in the mirror that are closer than they appear, the issues that looked smaller were huge in their very own sense. And in the midst of this hullabaloo of some people trying to voice the issues and others trying to shut it down, I missed the inside joke of DU: Pretence is the play that everyone loves. So the very organisations that might be vocal about the declining freedom of the Press in India would be the ones shutting the issues at the level they operate.
Thus was broken the dream of witnessing politics and change at the university level for maybe at a place where election results are decided with the gifted items, the dream was a mere delusion painted by the cinema that only encaptures and stops with its delivered euphoria.
The urge to break through the opaque walls to reach the transparent core is often defeated in the entire process of searching for information so the question that appears at the end is – Who is being joked upon and by whom in this ‘humorous’ circle?
Kashish Shivani