The best thing about living in a pseudo-communist area like JNU is that, you can sit in front of its own computer and bitch about its administration and the politics around it, and they can do nothing about it!! All hail the freedom of speech!! Even if they want to bash me up, they can’t… They can only talk ill of me and my blog, put up posters and burn my effigy. But isn’t that how publicity stunts work?
But you might wonder what it is I have against JNU and the way they run things around here. Well, let me tell you what happened yesterday, so sit back and get bored!
I enter the Dean’s office, which consists of this huge hall, where table, chairs and bureaus are strewn about in this random fashion. Ideally, there was supposed to be a person sitting at every table, and checking on the overwhelming stack of files piled on each table, but no! All the ‘officers’ in there were gathered around one particular table, talking and laughing to themselves. All of them had a cup of tea in their hand, and I could guess they had been there talking like that for the past 15-20 minutes! (Don’t quote me on this though)
Finally, one of them turns to look at me, wondering where the hell I had come from. So he asks me, and I ask him when they are supposed to put up the hostel list. They turn back at me, and look at each other in surprise, as though wondering what the heck I meant by hostel list! At long last, this watchman from the corner of the room shouts out that I could check it out on the first week of August! Yeah, right. He was the guy who told me last week that it’ll be out this week. He was also the same guy who said the week before last that it would be out last week!! And now he tells me next week?!
But as you can see, I’m only good at talking behind people. I never had the guts to fire them in the face! I just walked out in shock and anger.
Anyway, afterwards, I thought about how all the political parties were active in making helping the girls get their hostel, and how they were apparently pushing the Dean’s office to get the job done faster. It was later that I realized that after majority of the students got their rooms, they dropped the issue altogether.
When I first came to JNU, I wondered why political parties were so active here among the students union, and what made the students union so active. I later realized that it was because the administration was so bad, that such unions could survive. When I was in St Xavier’s, those catholic fathers were such good administrators, that they did whatever they could to keep the standards of the college at a high level. The student union couldn’t exactly ask for something.
Well, this must be a taste of the ‘big bad world’, JNU, with all its greatness in the field of Indian social research, is such in such a pathetic condition, that the administrators need the politicians to goad them, while the politicians begin their goading just to show the rest of the world that they are still alive, and ‘kicking’!!
What has happened to the idea of altruism, where people do things without expecting anything for themselves? Why does everybody work in such a way as to get their own agenda done? What has happened to the joy of doing things just for the sake of the betterment of the neighborhood/ city/ country/ world?
We can start with Bush, and his agenda of getting oil, or some other gain, in the guise of conquering terrorism. Even the terrorists engage in a very personal warfare with Bush, without considering the welfare of the innocent lives? Interestingly, the world lives on this very fine balance where people work out everything for their own interests.
Even many Christians and Evangelists and other social servants do what they do just for the sake of being recognized; “That people may see their good works and glorify them instead of their Father in Heaven”.
Big deal, after pointing fingers at the rest of the world, I’m no different. I would readily do many things as long as I get something for myself. What would happen to the world if there are more and more people who live their lives just to make lives better for those who live around them? Imagine.
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