 Stephania
(A Poem)
by Benjamin Gillani
The Lessons of Rudra Court
by Amitav Ghosh
Being There
by Sagarika Ghose
Memories
by Pawan Kumar Verma
Stephania: An Evocation
by Shashi Tharoor
Leg Spinners
by Anurag Mathur
And the Women
Arrived
by
Chandan Mitra
A Change of
Mission
by
Aman Nath
Note (on) the
changing aesthetics/ethics of college
by
Rahul Govind
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Being There
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by Sagarika Ghose
When I joined St. Stephen's, I was convinced that the
place was simply a well-packaged myth. That the mince cutlets, the
facilities and rich inner life was just the inventions of an
efficient propaganda machine at work. But, the charms of St
Stephen's are insidious and creep up on you when you least expect
it. A winter afternoon in Rudra court or a summer morning in the
cafe are just cliches. Much more important than the scenery and the
sandstone is just the simple fact of just being there. The delicious
sense of achievement that oozes out of the walls,the comfort of the
trees, the soft grass are fantastic because they are evidence of the
wondrous fact that I actually made it to this college. I think
that's the one security blanket that has carried me through my years
there. And the sense of well being that we all had, rose from the
simple fact of having actually got in. So enjoy the time that you
have in college, because the same sense of achievement over three
years is hard to replicate later in life.
The teachers were great too. In my time, they
were young and trendy. One of them jogged to college, another lived
in a 'commune' and once asked us why on earth any one of us ever
wanted to get married. Most of all they taught you to think, to dig
deep for deeper layers of honesty if you really want to achieve
something worth the name.
I still think about college sometimes. Think
about how I and all my contemporaries have trod the straight and
narrow, got married, had our kids and got on with our jobs. That's
life, I guess. But there was a time on Allnutt Lawns when we killed
ourselves because of the blind empty world, swore we would change
it, think original thoughts and build new institutions. College
gives you that freedom, that confidence and that dream. And it's a
dream that you always carry around and sneakily believe that you
might just realise some day, because, after all you did go to St
Stephen's.
Sagarika Ghose is columnist with Hindustan Times, and had also
written a novel entitled 'The Gin Drinkers'.
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