On the journey back from the familiar landscape of Delhi, and more particularly familiar the IIT Delhi diaspora, I’d planned to vent some sort of expression about some raging sentiments in some form or the other.
A few weeks ago, as two of my pretty close pals would be aware of, I was invited to carry out the inter-hostel parliamentary debate to be held sometime during mid-Jan, as was indicated at that point in time. Quite in line with an oft-made-cancelled-remade plan to pay a visit to the relive some amount of nostalgia, I decided to ponder seriously over the prospect.
T had exams around that time, and I’d anyway been denied my rightful refund of an excess of about 11.5k bucks by the red tapes, so a plan was made to drop by for a week. As is often the case, the room to be stayed in was supposed to be arranged for only when I got there.
Perhaps as soon as I glazed across the crimson paan-tainted walls, the usual snapshots of various Indian races and classes in condensed dilapidated railway benches, the eager more-often-than-not denied coolies, and the horde of shady taxiwalas, amongst the haggling auto pullers, I knew some amount of the capital’s nostalgia was already complete.
Anyway, amidst dense fog and ongoing work in C.P., through numerous detours, managed to reach my alma mater (feels classy being able to refer to it like that now) and took up lodging in a junior’s residence who was rather conveniently heading to a seven day sojourn to the pink city himself.
The red tapes didn’t bother me that much and I got the money within a few hours, but perhaps the lull and the sense of security and comfort before a whole pile of stale shit hits you in the face is nature’s way of dealing with things, in general.
The debate was to be a 4-day affair, preceded by a workshop on the night of the day I arrived. It was to be conducted by BB (Benjamin Button, euphemism, intended to denote someone who gets caught in a shit-storm for no fault of his own, but who does come out with some sort of feeling of satisfaction) and myself. The other pal apart from BB who’d invited me was B5 (Bald But Brilliant Brainless Bastard, intended to denote precisely that) who happened to be taking part from one of the tipped-to-win hostels, my old hostel, V or AK (Anti K). Incidentally the other ‘favourite’ hostel was K, or AV (Anti V). Having clarified all the terminology, let me straightaway get into the saga that was the inter hostel parliamentary debate 2010.
The mindless twits so said to be representatives of their respective hostels had voted in favour of a 3-on-3 style of debating, blissfully ignorant of the complications that seemingly innocent choice was to contain. Briefly, it meant single chairs, shady untested adjudicators and a LOT of adjustments as far as scheduling matches was concerned. Frankly, I’d missed all the action, and was much happier to oblige than BB, but I do feel proud to remark that, apart from a single moment of BB losing his cool, the management and scheduling went off fabulously well.
However, it is hardly the management that would make the highlight if a report were to be written by articulate member of V or K (as I’m sure it will for the next CR) for much more in the nature of the bizarre, upsetting, infuriating and just plain sad awaited the competition. While the focus would be on the insane amount of upsets that were caused during the competition, no single day unaccounted for, it transpired so that the focus or rather the victim of BB’s and my sheer disgust was something else.
It is often agreed in many circles, and discussed even at greater lengths, that the masses, fuelled of course by the media, have an illusory perception of what really goes on inside the country’s most prestigious engineering institutes. Perhaps even more doubt may be cast on terming henceforth the entrées to the campus as the best and consequently the most brilliant minds of our time. For if such a tag were to be placed merely upon the performance in a single test, these specimens would outdo others by milestones. But not going into the depths or even touching upon 3 idiots or anything remotely similar, let me just begin by asking an innocuous query – Would you call a man brilliant if he were to show a blank face at the mention of say, things like racial profiling, marijuana, the Af-Pak issue, the Swiss ban on minarets, Darfur or the fact that Chile is a communist country?
Well, if you’re of the same contemptible breed of living-under-a-rock creatures, you’d probably say, “what’s that got to do with anything?” which, rather abruptly, would bring me to my main point – the lack of awareness and pure ignorance of even the supposedly well-read crop of IIT debaters, is only a staggering indication of the level of proverbial bliss their counterparts must be enjoying. My god, if this debate’s revelations were anything to go by, if someone were to go around asking people to differentiate between poster-sized images of Mussolini and Rajnath Singh, I’d wager if even 5 out of a 100 would know the freaking difference!
It goes to say that it’s beyond adjectives like ‘sad’ and ‘unfortunate’, this discovery. Debate was said to be a pursuit of the cultivated and educated minds, but if lads and lasses here in the campus would rather debate homosexuality, capital punishment and prostitution, and be concerned more about winning than the pure joy of debating, then it’s probably fair to say that the objective for which PD was founded in IIT has reached full circle, and that this crowd deserves prepared debates on clichéd topics more than anything else. Common knowledge is suddenly not so common anymore, wit, fact-based arguments & their rebuttals and acknowledgement has become extinct, a newspaper is a black and white piece of rubbish supposedly expected to be perused only by those who have a plan to sit for the Civil Services later, and perhaps the most saddening part of all, current topics are struck out without a moment’s delay and if they are taken upon by some unfortunate incident, then you better brace up for either the slimiest or the shittiest piece of proposition you’ve seen not remotely unmatched by the opposing side in levels of ignorance and juvenility.
To round off the debate, after rather disappointing days throughout the tournament marked occasionally with an odd debate that would require some amount of looking at one's notes, in all fairness to all the teams, the final did outdo all expectations in terms of quality and the preciseness of arguments, the reason for BB's satisfaction, however small it may be. The verdict was much to B5's and V's dismay and consequently K's delight, who even though losing out the night before to V on pure sliminess, seemed somehow sadly content. In that one moment, I knew my purpose of listening to some good debates had been a Utopian dream all along, and that things will only worsen from here on out. I may paint a gloomy picture, but frankly, the nicest thing you could say about it all, would probably be the title of this post.
