Keya Sarkar: Knowledge doesn't come easy
PEOPLE LIKE THEM
| The downside is of course the effect that Santiniketan has on most people, that does not spare students "" Indian or foreign. Being a relatively peaceful, beautiful and cheap place to live in, many of the students who join diploma or "casual" courses often become residents. Very often you meet students of sculpture one year, learning Sanskrit the next or beginning with learning the sitar and ending with philosophy. |
| And while they are in Santiniketan the local language, the prevalent ways of dressing, the street food, the pace of life in general all leave their stamp and the students change unrecognisably at times. Japanese men with their sitar strapped to their backs having ghoogni, or German girls wearing a big bindi, arguing in broken Bengali with the vegetable vendor are common sights around the campus. Influenced by this milieu, a friend of mine applied for permission to take the entrance examination for a two year diploma course in a foreign language. With his application form, however, he was asked to produce a proof of residence (just to ensure that he does not ask for hostel accommodation later, as the counter clerk explained to him). |
| He asked a common friend of ours, also a professor at the university, to certify that he did have the means to provide for his own accommodation and the professor obliged. The counter clerk was satisfied, my friend got his entrance exam admit card and all was well. |
| The entrance exam was relatively easy, even for my friend who hadn't taken such exams in years, working as he was in the corporate sector earlier. Yet, he seemed a bit nervous on the day the results of the entrance exam were to be announced. When he took a look at the list of students who had made the grade, he was disappointed. But that was short lived as he realised that he was scanning the bottom of the list for his name, while in fact his name was right on top. "Since it was not alphabetical, the ranking must have been according to age," he sounded convinced, as he recounted this to us. |
| Having cleared the entrance exam, he now needed to "obtain" admission. Armed with the requisite papers he approached the clerk, who informed him that his residence certificate, signed by a professor of the same university would not do and he would need to get another signed by a municipal authority or a panchayat official. This would normally be pretty simple. Except that my friend lives in Purbapally, (an area in which plots were leased to residents by Viswa Bharati for 99 years when Tagore established the university) and therefore he neither has a municipality nor a panchayat. In fact, he argued that since he lives in an area owned by the university he should be able to get a certificate from the only person who would have jurisdiction: the university's estate officer. |
| The counter clerk did not agree and instead gave him the name of a gentleman who was a municipal councillor for adjoining Bolpur, which was the original town before Tagore established Santiniketan next to it. My friend did as he was instructed but the councillor too was surprised and repeated what my friend already knew that Purbapally did not fall under any panchayat or municipality. However, he graciously signed a residence certificate. The admission clerk accepted! And my friend has started attending his classes. |