The concept of the group is bizarre. As soon as you join this college, you received orders from seniors to take part in various cultural competitions and showcase the State that has shown confidence in you, that has promoted you to study in this institute of national importance. In short, you were supposed to represent Bengal. On the part of the seniors, it was a unifying force to face bullies, to shred competition and book tickets while travelling home. On the part of the newly admitted students, it was submission to a selected few rather than the vast majority of the college. You were supposed to comply to instructions from your own seniors, those who knew your culture well; which fairly indicated they had every right to rag you, make you write their tutorials and book tickets for them. On the other hand, they were supposed to protect you from the rest of the college. Of course, 2007 was the last year when such groups based on State/UT could be identified prominently in campus. My juniors would not be aware about such structures in this college and therefore, a more vivid picture of the group structure needs to be presented before I carry the story of my life forward.
Bengal group was supposed to be the coolest of all groups in college. Nevertheless, a couple of days into college and we were seen going from room to room asking everybody in Tagore if there was anybody therein from West Bengal. We would write down their state rank and AIR in order to cut down the submission from a group of 25 seniors to one, the father. The father referred to the one admitted the year ago, in the same branch and allotted the same seat in order of rank. The grandfather was his father. No point saying that the forefather was his father. Of course, before every GT (get together for the uninitiated) and every RC (Room call), we were supposed to know the names of every senior, all 75 of them by heart and pronounce them like parrots at the slightest signal. How I managed to remember the names of 75 people I had never met is a different story altogether. At the GTs, we faced remarks for all things we had done and things we could not do. There were a couple of anthems to be memorized and the moment you let out a laugh, you would sing it aloud to everybody present. Those were days of fun.
Room calls was a special method of personal interaction with the seniors. Surrounded by a bunch of ten to fifteen seniors in a cramped room, you would sing, dance and do anything at their whims. Engineering college is so dreary without these whims, right! These exercises were supposed to make you stronger in life, as if it would anyways help you perform on the stage. Of course, these exercises helped us come closer to our seniors, which was a good thing when the notices for the technical fest were out. The names that we had memorized were all over the walls on the notices. Truly, Bengal group rocks.
Of course, what we faced as part of ragging is immaterial to what my friends faced in other groups. Those from the North-East were made to beg on the train, perform dances and collect money; then when the ragging session was over, they had to return the money to everybody they had collected it from. Ask the mallus from Kerala how many slaps they had before getting rid of all inconveniences in first year; of course, there was no other group that had the same kind of bonding as Kerala.
A question that frequently comes up whenever I try to explain the structure of the group system to somebody is, what happened if somebody did not join the group, as Abhijit Das did. Well, you were unnerved by your seniors in person and through various other channels, terrified to death about how you were agile to other seniors and blah blah; but the truth is nothing happened. Just that you missed all the fun and had no connection with your seniors.
The group, as such, wasn’t a force of unification much, other than during GTs, RCs and the FTR (Final touch of ragging :P) and Bengal group GTs were the intellectual-type. I liked them. At the first Bengal group GT at the college cafe, we were introduced to the annual Knowledge festival of the college, Gnosiomania. The logic for bringing out such a topic in a State GT was quite apparent; most organizers were from Bengal. No doubt then, it was also called by many as Bengalomania. Gnosiomania was supposed to be a quizzing festival with some literary and business events, organized without much help from the administration, and running almost like a revolutionary movement. We were supposed to volunteer for the event. We did readily. Other than these GTs and RCs, there was only one occasion when groups became centers of sprawling activity, Culrav.
The group culture did not manifest its true colors until the sun started bestowing its radiant sunshine towards the beginning of spring. The cultural festival of the college had among other things, a cultural panorama that presented a picture of the various parts of the country and a folk dance, and Bengal group was called all at once to assemble at MP Hall. The cultural panaroma was a unique platform to showcase the beauty of your homeland to the other students coming from all parts of India and beyond. India's rich cultural heritage was depicted in the form of tableaus from various states. Each group tried to depict its unique festivals, historical locations, literature and art. This exhibition of diversity and richness of the culture of India lent a festive air to the occasion. Bengal group had featured prominently in the cultural pavilion in the past and we started working in this direction with immediate effect.
The meeting at MP Hall was for a different motive altogether. Bengalis are considered to be great patrons of art, literature, music and dance and you can see a singing academy, a dancing academy and art classes in almost all paras (housing colonies) of Bengal. The Bengali dance had, however, never been performed at MNNIT ever before. There was no dearth of talented dancers in the group, but there was a dearth of initiative and it was a benign effort of some girls and seniors to stage a Bengali dance at Culrav. The initiative was appreciated by everybody but nobody wanted to take a lead. We had never shaken a leg before and performing before such multitude of people was scary. Lily ma’am especially prodded us, “We have been performing in dances from other parts of India. Why? Is it because we do not have a culture of our own? No, it’s because we are shy to demonstrate that culture. If we do not start this now, we may never be able to stage a Bengali dance in this college. I implore you to fulfill my dream.” For her sake, we agreed to see if we had the numbers to perform on stage. Those who were outright against the idea gave every effort to miss every beat and repudiate every step. After several rounds of auditioning, the few who showed some little interest were selected for the drill. Thereafter, every evening after class, we stayed for dance practice and late in the night, we worked for the cultural pavilion.
I have spent all my childhood and most of my adolescence in West Bengal. Yet, Darjeeling is so disconnected from Bengal that I never understood the essence of the Bengali culture, their dressing styles, their food, the literature and arts as I understood during the one month before this Culrav. In fact, there is a complete mismatch of cultures between the peoples of Darjeeling and Bengal. In the hills, the food is different, the dressing sense is different, the language is different. The one month with the Bengali dance squad made me greatly appreciate the culture of Bengal. Not that, I did not know much about it; at St. James’ the vast majority of students in the Science section were Bengalis, but I never formed a part of their circle. The Bengalis are a class of reserved people; they form a very close group of close friends, many of them known since childhood, and share their social circle very closely with these friends. The exclusivity of this circle is such that entry is highly restricted and surprisingly, everybody seems to get along very well, in spite of all the differences which is hardly apparent to onlookers. They appear as an entity, and such unison should inspire all Indians to look beyond their own differences to stay together, come what may. I associated more so with the Marwaris, the Biharis, the Nepalis and other groups at St. James’ and even in the heart of Bengal, the true culture of Bengal was not perceived prominently. During the one month with the Bengali dance squad, I entered this exclusive range and learned a lot of things about the Bengali culture.
For one, Bengalis are very talkative. They are very fond of food and that is one thing over which they can spend a lot of money, otherwise they manage their finances very well. They like to go places, but are afraid of walking in the unknown all alone. They care for money, but their life revolves around the family and their needs. Of course, these are generalizations; then there are specializations. That is a subject I do not want to touch lest it should overflow the volume of a novel. One particular thing that struck me with the Bengalis was the fun they have with simple things; beads of rice, blades of grass, non-sense gossip and papercraft. Between the dance sessions, several of these things came out. One particular day, the topic of discussion drifted to the unchartered domain of first crush; a topic many Bengalis may not be very comfortable with and one I had never expected in this group.
Yes, people did raise their reservations against discussing in public such a topic, but they eventually did. I was taken off the balance. I had never thought of one. I was a geek; I could not contemplate thinking of one. And almost intuitively, out of the subconscious, came my reply. “I am committed.”
For a moment, that seemed to settle the matter, but did it? I kept prodding myself what made me tell that. Where did that answer come from? That night, I called home. I felt very uncomfortable talking to them. I disconnected in less than a minute. It was time to introspect. I called Binay. I could not talk to him much either. I could not understand the kind of feeling sweeping through me. It was getting dark and I called Sneha. Unusually, I talked to her for over an hour. We talked of the rains in Delhi and the no rains in Allahabad, banana trees and their large leaves, Republic day parade in Delhi and our cultural pavilion in Allahabad and the Bengali dance. When I hung up, I was surprised by the amount of talking I had done with Sneha on the other side. I was usually the listener in her company, this was a phenomenal change. How did things change all of a sudden. I needed a good sleep to put things into perspective. The next morning, the sun seemed warmer than before, the smell of the earth woke me up, I could almost fly out of bed with newly refilled energy and stride off like a jaunty child. I was in love.