The Group’s Study

If you had not seen the board proclaiming it as an institute of technology, you would have been right in mistaking it to be a chawl. It was a cement-coloured E-shaped building looming at the edge of a slum. Along each of its six floors ran a contiguous lobby providing access to every layer of classroom stacked on top of each other. As you measured the chawl-comparison for suitability, a look at the intense security at the gate, restricted movement of teenagers inside the premises, and the general vibe of anxiety would conjure a more apt visual cue. A Jail!! It was called that even by the strictest parent of many an engineering student schooled within it. This was twenty years ago. It has got to be different now. It is hard to imagine parents with millennial aesthetics sending their children to be tutored in an environment reeking of the kaamchalao nineties.

Recollections from that long ago are bound to be sketchy, but some things are clear to this day. On any functional day, no one was allowed inside the college gate after 7:30 am. Those who were outside had plenty of time to mull on their missed attendance, whereas those inside were not allowed to leave the campus until lectures were done for the day. Once the gates shut, no one could leave. The canteen did not open till noon. There was not a single unpunished soul outside the classrooms once the lectures had started. Those who were punished could not escape the attention of the principal who roamed the passageway for his daily dose of moral scavenging. There were only two places one could hide: the ground, and the library. But most students were not willing to escape their regimentation scared as they were of their fates in the semester examination; the six-monthly storm brewed by capricious, under-paid, cynical University faculty.

Some brave-hearts like me tried and failed spectacularly. I hid myself in the ground; the most open space in the college and also, the least monitored. The ground was Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and I, the gluttonous Augustus Gloop, gobbling my way to glory. Predictably, when the storm came, it blew me away and the only glory I had was to collect ATKTs(Allowed to keep terms). I have yet to come across a better euphemism for failure.

Strangely, some of my more regimented friends also did not fare better and after having been through four semester storms, alternatively succumbing to and escaping its wrath, things started to get clear. Firstly, spending time on the ground was as much a cause for failure as diligent attendance of lectures was a guarantee of success. Secondly, engineering was a practical discipline; it could not be simulated in one’s imagination based on any number of books one had read, especially since very little of that bookish knowledge had ever been ratified in practice. This made us easy prey to even the slightest manipulation in questioning, nevermind the diabolical probing that our examiners subjected us to. The game was loaded and there had to be a more effective way of dealing with it.

The “E’ shaped building was separated along its middle into two equal halves of three-sided rectangles; one of which housed the Institute of Technology and the other, the Arts and Sciences. The space in between our three-sided rectangle was called ‘the quadrangle’. The library was the first floor of an entire wing. That made it the single largest room in the institute. Its interiors carried the same architectural frugality of the entire premises; long study tables arranged in rows faced aisles of bookcases separated by a partition, manned by the librarian.

For the first four months of every semester, library occupancy was subdued. In the last two months, especially during preparatory leave, it was overflowing with patrons. There was an unspoken hierarchy among the library patrons. Like all things collegial, it was based on seniority. The tables closest to the entrance were least preferred ones. Ones at the centre were better, but they were directly within the librarian’s field of vision. All these could be inhabited by the first and second yearites. Third yearites occupied the penultimate rows and the B.Es, as fourth yearites were referred to prematurely, preferred the last tables, especially a twelve-seater in the corner that looked over the arts and sciences quadrangle. It was the best lit, most ventilated spot in the library with a full view to the arts and sciences section.

Around the end of second year, I began to see these library patrons in a different light. Until then, I never understood why anyone would want to waste their preparatory leave going to college when it could be spent in infinitely better ways. Wasn’t four months in that grey penitentiary enough to head there back for one more? Maybe there wasn’t enough room to study at home or they had some other distraction that needed escaping. I might have even regarded their need for congregating with some mild amusement. But the joke had been on me and having better understood the anatomy of failure, I reached the conclusion that if you exclude geniuses, of which we had a few, the rest of us were in the same hamlet rummaging for any sort of protection against the impending hurricane.

The traditional human response to any natural disaster has always been based on solidarity. Huddle up together, use the desperation of others to drive yourself to prepare better. Pool in the many factional understandings of a subject and infer the whole. Hack the examination paper by looking at questioning patterns of previous years. Photocopy one professor’s notes to cover a part of the syllabus, a chapter from a book to cover another. Scrap, forage and claw your way to survival. Each and every of these tasks benefited when multiple perspectives were involved. By the end of my third year, I had spent two semester preparatory leaves in the library which, for me, had functioned as a storm shelter for anyone who wanted to survive the semi-annual storms brewed by the university druids.

Naturally, had it been all books and studies I wouldn’t have lasted more than a week. But, apart from the lunch break, our studying was interspersed with chai-sutta breaks, punctuated by cheese-masala toast or ragada patties, and laced with exuberant digressions into all things Indian; film, music, cricket. And in between, we got a chapter or two done. The library had an ecosystem. Those who weren’t early birds or found the library too stifling, or were more prone to passionately engage in digressions, or had a running tiff with the librarian, would be found hanging around the various ends of the quadrangle. This was the library’s extended family. I still remember an asbestos shed with granite seats and tables tucked to the side of the quadrangle at the edge of the ground from where the wind repeatedly blew the photocopied notes and books. This is where I had many a revealing discussion with my peers.

Of course, the library was a shelter not a silver bullet against the storm. The same number of examinations remained eighty per cent out of syllabus or completely random in their structure. But I didn’t panic anymore. There was some measure of reassurance that I would get through by focussing my attention to what I had prepared and that there were a lot of others in the exam hall who at this point were doing the same thing.

I am certain that the library does not exist today the same way it did before. I fully expect rows of computers on the tables where our books and notes lay scattered. After all, the internet is the highway to the best libraries in the world. But the library for us was never about the books. It was a place of congregation to deal with an examination far too severe for each of us as individuals to weather alone. All of us benefited in bouncing our half-baked ideas off one another, our morale at critical junctures boosted by each other, our stress reduced by telling bad jokes to each other and overall, we survived a course wherein each of us had bitten off far more than they could chew. And just for that sake, I hope the Millennials have a library of their own.