Five Years Forever- III

In the end the long and short of it is that many grudgingly took the exam, some bravely abstained, most failed, most letters reached homes, some even had unhappy consequences but amidst all this our spirit emerged victorious. So nothing changed, and life went on.

Soon winter came and we realiaised why Pune is such wonderful place. If there is anything as a “perfect winter” it is the Pune winter. Delhites disagree but I have always found the Delhi winter to be cold in an impersonal way unlike the Pune winter, which is inviting and embracing. Never chillingly cold to the bone but still cold enough to flaunt pullovers and jackets, cold enough to always be centre of our conversations but never menacing enough to keep us indoors, it was perfect. The temperature is just right to go out and have a cup of coffee with friends. A lot did happen over a cup of coffee but mostly it was at Zaika’s and not CCD. Late into the night, sitting at the sidewalk opposite Zaika and sipping steaming coffee, remains the signature image of the winters. As the winter progressed, say around January, exams often started popping up in late night coffee talks. But it all ended with the consolation that there were still a couple of months to go, which implied that we could afford more fun. People started going back home for the so called “study leave” and then by Feb. only a handful of brave souls remained in Pune. I was one of them. Soon we had a lot of advice from people who had gone back home about their lack of any headway as far as studies were considered. This bolstered our spirits and egged us on to have more fun and made us believe that studies could be kept for some more time at the backburner. The truth is that with most of our friends away life was not all that cool. Of course the movies, coffees and beer did not stop but the zing was missing.

Then came the time when we could no longer afford not to study. The harsh truth of examinations could no longer be obscured and we were left with the choice of “do or die”. Now, no one wants to die, if he can help it that is; so out came our books and we sat down with the purpose of somehow passing the exams. Seniors had already told us about the strange ways in which the Pune University awarded or not awarded marks and it did no wonders to our already jittery confidence. The fact remains that we did get down to some serious studying for the last one month. A lot was at stake after all. We had just begun to realise the enormous “extra academic” possibilities the next four years in Pune presented, what a rollicking holiday it was turning out to be and we were in no way prepared to chuck all this because of a lousy exam.

Finally, the exams started sometime in middle of April. The smart people had realised that the mantra of success lay not in the heavy tomes that preached about the different subjects we had to suffer but in the yellow coloured exceedingly thin “note” book called the “Pathan Notes” which could teach those voluminous tomes a thing or two about brevity. Badly written, typeset horribly, alien to the concept of proof reading, and full of errors, English that was pedestrian- by all accounts it made you feel that it was one sure way of flunking. But anyone who really read it still has to flunk, for in spite of all this, it did reduce whole subjects to 40 to 50 pages. Some even went to the extent of saying that the university awarded marks on the basis of the faithfulness of reproduction from the Pathan books; it was rumoured that even the examiner’s were guided by it. So with a lot of help from the Pathan’s , and with our sincere will to have a even better time the next year we took the exams. And most of us did make it, much to our own surprise. We had seen the power of Pathan’s first hand and then there was no turning back. It ensured that for the remaining of our law education books were out of the picture. Having already done away with classrooms in the beginning of the year, we ended by making even the books irrelevant. It’s a wonder how we became lawyers!

One Hundred Thousand Crore Problem !

Mittal Steel today announced that it will apply in four weeks for land to set up its 12-million tonne steel plant in Jharkhand. Sanak Mishra , the CEO, of Mittal’s Jharkhand Greenfield Project, said that the company needed about 12000 acres of land. This will not be easy for the man who is basking under the glory of taking over Arcelor. Chief Minister, Arjun Munda, after his euphoric MOU signing spree to the tune of 100,000 crores, is slowly beginning to realise this. Land and mining rights which are central to all these MOUs will ultimately determine their fate.

What Mittal Steel has done today, the Birla’s and the Essar’s will do tomorrow. The Tata Group has already identified land for its 25,000 crore expansion drive. Even by conservative estimates all this translates into making available more than 25,000 acres of land. Munda will have to do an act akin to the Great Indian Rope trick to pull this off. The reason is simple. Local tenancy laws have ensured that almost all non-urban land rests with the Schedule Tribes. STs constitute 26% of the state population. Add another 10% of the Scheduled Castes and we have 36% of the population which has reasons to feel uncomfortable about the whole scenario. Nor does the answer lie in the forests. Around 28% of all the land in Jharkhand is under forest cover but unfortunately for Munda, more than 27% of those are “Reserved Forests” and “Protected Forests”, which means that the state cannot use it for other purposes. It is obvious that in his jest for signing MOUs one after the other, the Chief Minster overlooked these issues.

The political ramifications of this are no less significant. There is a feeling among the STs that all these development projects are only going to further alienate them. Previous experience with PSUs like Coal India Limited and the NTPC wherein a large number of people were displaced without and any adequate rehabilitation scheme, has only made the people suspicious of the government. Already voices of protest can be heard from the villages. In a state where the 18 out 22 districts are Naxalite affected, this is the opportunity the Maoists need to galvanize people in a major anti government movement. The government has not announced any policy in this regard apart from the rhetoric of “people friendly policies”. There are many Kalinganagars waiting to erupt in the state.

The future of the Munda government can also become shaky. The government enjoys power with a razor thin majority of one MLA. The coalition could be cobbled together at the eleventh hour only with the support of five Independent MLAs. When the going gets tough there is no telling which way the “Independents” will go. Has Munda bitten off more than he can chew?

This is an analysis of a report that appeared in The Telegraph dated 17th August about Mittal's application for land in Jharkhand.

Five Years Forever - II

This was also the time of great social churning. New friendships were being forged, some old ones forgotten and some still remained a possibility. Love was taking its own discreet course. New lovers were being discovered and promises given to older ones in distant cities were getting blurred. As if a group of persons had decided that it was the time to move on and don new avatars. It was a tumultuous period and excited heartbeats were palpable in the air. Then there were people who remained outside this churning. Our gang remained unaffected by this, at least in the first year, but later life and love took its own course for us. Great friendships were formed and some have stayed that way. Romance also burst into the scene with a bang but most faded away with time. Straight from school, not cynical enough to discard the notion of true love, most of us fell head over heels for someone only to realize that all is not rosy, especially not in romance.

The flip side of students forsaking classrooms and college was that even after five years we don’t know our batch mates. The camaraderie found among batch mates is missing. In our more cynical moments we even say that this notion of the “Class of ‘06” is nothing more than a myth, for we never were a “class”, in any sense of the word. As soon as most of us found alternative classrooms in movie halls, coffee shops and pubs, we remained stuck to those places with our own small groups. It was like a cocoon that ensured that some became very close to some but remained aloof from the rest. In spite of this, all was not gloomy. Thanks to cell phones, there existed among us a network which cut across these cocoons. I mean, you are really never more than ten taps on the keypad away from anyone. That is a comforting thing. So we always knew which the hottest movie in town was, where the café latte had more cream and which place played the best music to have beer. Then their were the birthday bashes where everyone from the movie addicts to the coffee drinkers to the beer guzzlers came together. If you ask me, I think we had managed to create a class even without attending college. This is one of the great achievements of our batch. Everyone knew what everyone was up to. As if there existed some invisible wire which kept us loosely huddled together.

First year was also the time to explore the city. If you stayed somewhere in Senapati Bapat road and had gone to MG road then this was a thing to brag about. Without bikes and for some, cars; grappling to come to terms with the auto fare, it was no mean feat to go to the other side of the town just to have few beers. Our group had a rule. No auto rides after they started charging “half return”, which depending on which part of the city you were, to the larger question of how lucky you were, could start anytime after 10 pm. We simply walked back from wherever we were. So there were midnight walks from the railway station, from numerous movies halls back to the PG.

Suddenly, someone in the college got jealous about the kind of fun we were having. Then the college did something very foolhardy. It hung the sword of an internal examination over us. History will say that it remains the only attempt (a very feeble one at that) taken by the college to enforce even a semblance of discipline in us. It was too late by then. The action had shifted and they had missed the script. We were beyond redemption, from their perspective that is. Our side of the story is that we were singing “redemption song” as Bob Marley sang it many decades ago. They even tried to sharpen this rusted, worn examination sword by saying that they will post the result to our homes. Soon a million ways were devised to ensure that the letter never reached its destination or to ensure (done with a lot of out of the world photocopy ideas) that the letter that did reach had the “right” sort of marks. Meaning neither too high nor too low. After all our parents know us!

Five Years Forever - I

Five Years Forever -I

June, 2001. That’s when the majority of the class of ’06 set their foot for the first time in Pune. It did end up becoming a giant leap for most of us by June ’06. At the outset let me start by saying that only few privileged souls get the chance of being undergraduate students for five years without flunking or without making their parents suspicious about their academic whereabouts. Thankfully the five year law programme offers all this. And if you had the chance of doing all this at Symbi, sing Hosannas to Lady Luck for rest of your life. It is as if God, in all his mercy decided that certain young men and women deserved more fun than others. We were the first among equals when God was adding fun in the lives of people. That’s why we landed up in- let the complete truth be out, no more taking liberties with “fun”; the Symbiosis Society’s Law College, Pune. Our other not so lucky friends, who God destined to have less fun in life landed up in some place called the National Law School. More on that later. Let’s not share the Symbi spotlight.

I am able to say all this now because of the wonderful thing called hindsight. At that time none of us could of even remotely have foreseen the coming years -the way it turned out to be. Let’s not rush into things here. Chronology is a nice starting point, it seems. So let’s cut into a typical day in the First year.

These is a lot of activity going on in the corridor. Students are discussing everything from movies to politics to sports. Make a note here please, the discussion takes a long varied course but it does not even briefly touch the shores of academia. Symbi students even at the beginning had this uncanny ability of staying away from such non important topics. This was going to set the breakneck pace for the rest of the five years. Our classes started at 12 noon and soon the students figured that there were a lot of other things that could happen around the same time. For instance there was always “the movie” to catch, always some intellectual pursuit that could take place only at “Barista” and some thought that at 12 noon when the sun was beating down in its full glory, a pint of beer was the need of the hour. After everyone had found their own profound truth, the action shifted from the classrooms. Of course, there were a few not so enlightened souls, whose quest for truth had not lead them anywhere and so they remained in the classrooms waiting for nirvana. But for majority of us life lay beyond the theories of Contract, Political Science, Economics and Sociology.

Guys will soon post more about those glory days.

The moment begins.

After a lot of misgivings and some soulful introspection which did not lead me anywhere, and as with many other things in my life the decision to plunge into this world of blogging was finally taken at the spur of the moment. These spur of the moment decisions are amazing. You spend a lifetime contemplating, deliberating something and still answers remain elusive. Lo and behold! Suddenly comes a moment of truth and you take a decision. And more often than not, the decision you take is totally divorced from all the contemplation and soul searching you have done. It is as if there is something lurking in the subconscious, busy in some metaphysical arithmetic of its own, which gets fed up with this constant melodrama of the conscious and provides that elusive moment we have been striving for. And from than on for better or for worse we have taken the step. Hence, this blog.

I have no idea how this blog is going to shape up. Will this just reamain a forum for my inchorent ramblings like the one above or will it dig deep into other things. Time only can tell that. But for the moment, this is it.