One year ago,i said hiii to JNU
It was the 26th of December,2020. I had the first glimpse of the Agora of India, maligned and notorious and a place of my curious amazement. As I was standing at the main gate, my eyes fell on the board of JNU, followed by the ineffable glee of finally seeing the campus. For the next two days, I stayed inside, with moments teeming me with more excitement to think what it would be like after we would be called back to campus. There was one night when just outside the mess hall of the Satluj hostel, students debated for hours on whether they should be allowed to take food inside the hostel or they should eat inside the mess hall itself. It was so watchful to see a rather calm yet energetic interaction, devoid of display of machoism. I can’t state how happy I was to find in JNU exactly what I had imagined about it: a site where one can strongly disagree on issues without emotional outbursts.
The next few months were spent in company with Nitish-a sober, passionate boy with suppressed untold stories in him fighting to be listened to. It was a company that nudged me to be more diligent than I had been before. Over time, I experienced a continuous jolt on my conscience as to whether it was morally or intellectually appropriate to stay ideologically a centrist liberal. Centrism for the most part is a lie. And hanging a balance between left and right in a current socio-political environment is a morally incorrect position and an unacceptable one. Centrism hinges on vulgar moralism that supposedly intends to be correct. It is individualist and to the point of being almost nihilist, for all you care about is how close you are to the origin point. So yes, I became a leftist.JNU played a part in it and so did the political discourse of the country at the time.JNU is the place where you are flooded with the knowledge to evaluate your normative stand. If one is open enough, change is quite a possibility. After all, is it even learning if you are immune to change at the same time?
Meanwhile, I had fallen in love. Oh wait, was it love? Or an obsession?Or a habit? Or a social construct? Or a psychological construct arisen out of a vacuum waiting to be filled? Or all of them? Let’s for my lack of precision in judgement, call it love. That started as self-denying love and ended as self-annihilating love. I am being reminded of quotes of Jane Austen, Dostoyevsky and Goethe on love at the moment.I find all of them confounding. Confounding it is.Love.But why question? Love dies with a question, if it isn’t dead already.
Good friends are all we need.JNU gifts an amazing space to socialize with people you will like.people with intellect would provoke you,to the degree that your holding onto pre-existing beliefs becomes unstable.And walking along the road covered by trees,with friends or in moments of solitude, is unthinkably joyous experience.