Bogey of Great Institutions…

Mr Bhar, one of our esteemed retired colleagues from our services, has been an interesting person during his days in the service.  A jovial and easygoing person and he was friend of each one of us right from the junior level to senior level.  His stories and wits always carried a sense of curiosity for all of us and usually lunch session with him always brought a lingering happy feeling.  Years have since passed and I was told that he has settled in Mumbai itself after selling his paternal properties in Patna and also that his children are also working in Mumbai.  I too liked his company, his stories, not only because he was very friendly to all of us younger lot but also because he hailed from my native state of Bihar and above all he was also an alumni of the Science College, Patna my own alma mater.

He was otherwise a very satisfied and fulfilled individual but one pain he grudgingly expressed occasionally that another boy of his own class from the Science College, Patna, who was in the class of Chemistry Honours, which used to be considered for low rankers in those days, got a better rank in the Civil Services Examinations some 40 years ago despite him being in the superior and prestigious Physics Honours class in the same year in the college.  It so happened that the boy from the Chemistry Honours class ended up to be the Chairman of one of the Revenue Boards while he being recruited in Group ‘B’ services in the same department, could retire only in the rank of Director to the Government of India.  I don't intend to tell the stories about Mr Bhar, but I always felt in his company that there was a sense of pride in him being the alumni of the Science College, Patna and a disdain and contempt for all those who never had the opportunity to be in such a great institution.  One of the esteemed retired Chief Commissioners, Mr Tripathi used to say that we live in the comparative world which keeps you unhappy most of the time but sometimes it keeps you happy also by just thinking that Physics Honours is far better than the Chemistry Honours and you are superior to many others. But today I write to tell about something else which is intriguing me from very long time that is about my own time in the Science College, Patna.

It had been my aspiration, like lakhs of other students who appeared for the Secondary School Examination of 1982, conducted by the Bihar School Examination Board, to get admission in Science College, Patna.  The Board had changed from Pre-University and the Matriculation system only a year back and very blissfully we had old question papers for only one year to take cue from.  Somehow after getting a very good percentage in the examination I got admitted to Patna Science College and our classes started around this time of the year in the middle of the September some 31 years ago.  Coming from an organised system of my school, the college appeared to be some sort of animal farm where each of class was having more than hundred students and very ironically each of them were toppers  of the schools from different parts of the then combined the state of Bihar.

The classes used to be depressingly boring and all the teachers, all of them, were dead uninspiring, lousy and were lacking in all kinds of social skills.  Most of them appeared me to be losers and I don't remember having spoken to anyone of them during years of my stay in the college.  Recently I was speaking to one of my classmates, an engineer in railways, while remembering our days in the Science College, bitterness was still very perceptible because the teachers were simply unconcerned for the life and future of their students.  For these crooks, taking a lecture was just a pastime and a job to be done.  Most of them used to come into class with written notes and used to simply copy on blackboard before a sleeping class.  I still remember my time on the banks of the River Ganges after bunking classes specifically that of mathematics.

It was an opportunity for the institution to mould lives of so many children of 16 or 17 years of age, coming from the rural backgrounds, mostly from the villages and almost hundred percent of them were from Hindi medium schools.  But what these teachers did only to confuse them and all of them were left to themselves to search their own paths in their respective lives.  For doing these things no one required any institution however great it is known to be.  The culture of coaching institutions had just started and the mode of teaching was just copying something on the blackboard and the students were supposed to copy from there.  They used to prepare notes and memorise them for writing in examinations which used to be primarily descriptive in nature.  There was no concept of career counselling, in fact there was no communication between teachers and the students.  May be I'm expecting too much in the hindsight but there was no interface of any kind which could be thought in terms of future planning for those hapless students.  It was such a depressing feeling to run from class to class for the whole day and coming back to hostel in evening with even disappointing feeling of having learnt nothing.  In initial couple of months many of us were on the verge of nervous breakdown. I still remember poor Satish who started crying one day after coming from the class and was on verge of going insane only because he was unable to follow anything there. He went home as per advice of we friends and because he could spend little time away from the great institution he gained confidence. Satish works in Delhi nowadays; we keep meeting and he often says that he could sail through only on the strength of his contempt for the system and the institution.

The atmosphere in the hostel used to be even more agonising and being in the company of toppers was just a depressing feeling as almost all of them were spending time only on their study tables with books of Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics.  No one used to play any game and occasionally going to watch movies was the only thing which used to break the monotony of life but that also used to be considered as sin. They used to discuss about the Engineering and Medical Entrance tests but most of them used to be worried to clear the hurdle of passing the Intermediate examination itself. I still remember nobody had any clue those days of what to be done even for these entrance tests. It was very clear that the days of these kinds of colleges and their so called prestige were numbered and it was not very long when the coaching institutes not only proliferated but they obliterated not only the prestige but also the existence altogether of these useless behemoths which were simply not in sync with the requirements of time like dodos.

It was not that the city life was boring those days, Patna still used to be the cultural hub and during almost all the festivals, luminaries from various fields used to come to Patna to perform and without any dispute Patna used to be very large hearted host for all such cultural functions, maybe because explosion of TV culture was yet to happen.  At one hand the city used to be bubbling with the cultural activities, on the other hand the Patna Science College always looked like a place of mourning.  Looking back in time somehow reminds me that almost all of the students were lacking social skills and even after spending years in the Science College they were not able to come out of their inherent inhibitions. In hindsight I have no hesitation in accepting that in those years in Science College, I didn't learn anything worthwhile but to discard some of the good habits I had acquired during my school days.  I stopped going to library in search of good books and I almost forgot to read literature and poetry.  The syllabus prescribed and the books recommended had no relationship and reading those books written by foreign writers were a permanent pain in the neck.  I don't have any good memories of my days in Science College, Patna.

Couple of years back I had an opportunity to visit the hostel where I used to stay and somehow I could still feel the same dampness and disappointment in the air and possibly it was still lacking the spirit of learning even after passage of three decades.  Somehow the dread of being in a labour camp was still lingering and it was not before I ran out of patience and came running out of its boundary. The nostalgia has turned into nightmare. The hostel looked equally disgusting even after three decades and the indifference, which was the hallmark of this place, was still looming large.  Still I believe that this place used to be an animal farm or a stable which was somehow converted as hostel naming it after one of the great Indian mathematicians but the spirit of the animal farm was still lingering there.

I simply don't wish to remember any of the teachers from the Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics classes which causes nausea even after several decades, most of them used to wear the same cloths which they wore during their own college days and almost all of them suffered from speech impairment and to me they appeared to be parrots in human body.  Those were the days when your performance used to be measured by just only by your capacity to reproduce the best answers but the most unfortunate feeling still refuses to go away that of helplessness of the young boys who were left to fend themselves to search their own path in life and the indifference on the part of the teachers added to their woes.  I still remember that many of the children of these teachers were as confused as the rest of us.

Recently I read a book on Patna, written by Amitava Kumar, “A Matter of Rats” and it appears that the writer has seen the same Patna which I saw in my growing years and very ironically I could find that he had mentioned the same characters which truly used to reflect the true spirit of Patna.

http://www.amitavakumar.com

Jagdish Narayan Chaubey has been a hindi professor those days and most of the time he was very concerned with the young children sitting in his class and I can still recall his words which reflected that somehow he had sensed the spirit of an animal farm therein as he used to say that each of the students were horses of Aswamedh who have been sent from different parts of the state and the young Bhrigu Nandan Tripathi, who always used to quote Dusyant Kumar those days. Nobody used to miss these classes which used to reprieve from the heavy doses of science. I found that Amitava Kumar is still referring to Muniba Shami, Indibar Mukherjee, Sushma Mishra and not to forget Dr. Shaileshwar Sati Prasad. It brought tears to my eyes when I was reading about them as the English department of the college was better equipped than most of the regular Post Graduate Colleges and universities those days. They used to publish literary articles even those days and the cultural seminars used to be very popular because of large participation. On the other hand, the constipated faces of the teachers from the science section used to bring only doom and none of them had ever published any paper in their whole life and hardly there was any culture of conducting and attending any seminar. Some of them always looked as if they were suffering from tuberculosis.

Looking back in time I don’t have one good thing to remember which I learnt in the college, that great prestigious Science College, Patna.  Somehow I survived the onslaught because of my own learning in the school from the old-fashioned teachers who were kind enough to teach us the ways and made us robust enough to face the vagaries of life.  Looking back in time one thing I can say with all responsibility that whatever I am today and possibly all of them, who used to be with me in those turbulent years, had been able to achieve despite the Science College, very certainly not because of the Science College, Patna. At best it could be considered to be a place to stay in Patna at nominal rate and for getting subsidised food in its hostel mess and nothing more than that. 

Further the incompetence, aloofness, callousness and indifference of teachers and the administration of such so called prestigious institutions coupled with remaining oblivious of changing requirements of the education system have been the basic reasons because of which various coaching institutes have flourished. I am very happy to see that nowadays many of the IRS probationers have never been to colleges, let alone these decorative prestigious institutions as they have got their education and degrees through correspondence courses and their entry into the civil services had been through the coaching institutes. I really don't know whether it would be proper to say but I can't help to observe that the coaching institutes have now shown these great institutions the place what they always deserved and very strangely I feel very happy about it.  

This has been the burden on my head for decades and I always wanted to throw this bogey and most certainly I'm not as proud as Mr Bhar used to be for his days in Science College, Patna.  I believe that the story of greatness of other similar prestigious colleges would have not been any different and many of such stories are required to be told with honesty. There is another bogey of the Engineering College, another great and prestigious institution, which I would try to get rid of in by next blog post.