More than fifty students crammed into a classroom. Twelve
of them were girls. Dressed mostly in long skirts and matching blouses which
reached upto their navels, they sat on the benches taking care to seem
unassuming always. Some of them draped quarter of a saree over the skirt-blouse
combination, while the ubiquitous dhoti with shirt was the accepted dress code
for boys. Everybody was tense. Suddenly a tall gentleman wearing pants mounted
on the platform. We all stood up. He asked us to introduce ourselves in
English. As we were fumbling, the real lecturer stormed into the room
menacingly eyeing on the impersonator. In a second, the impostor vanished
without trace. He was just a senior student. Mr.Panikker, the English lecturer
started giving a talk on the short stories of W.W.Jacobs, which went over our
heads. He had second thoughts after a short while and we were asked to write a
resume on the first day in college. He collected our works and kept it in his
left hand like a bunch of currency notes. Then he started counting them. In
fact, he was browsing through our feedback.
“None of you can write even
one sentence correctly.”
We had a sigh of relief.
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| Sanjay Ashtaputre - |
The boys were like unquiet sea, agitated for no apparent reason. They desperately wanted to talk to the girls and make friendship with them. There was a secret longing to feel the soft company of girls and to touch them. This was not quite possible as several barriers imposed by the society existed between the sexes. As a result, the boys were relentlessly trying to catch the attention of the girls, inside the classroom as well as outside. More often than not, these efforts turned into damp-squibs. Mayhem was a regular affair at the open-air wash during lunch break. Only one of the pipes worked and others were perennially out of order. It was a free-for-all for a few minutes.
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| Sanjay Ashtaputre - |
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| Sanjay Ashtaputre |
The classroom was a dehumanizing place. The walls were filled with obscene graffiti as well as sketches of naked women. Erected male genitalia were aplenty, named after female lecturers and college beauties. Vulgar comments and howls filled the air. Still, no one complained.
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