NALSAR. The dream of thousands, an Island of excellence and a temple of intellectuality. Right? Wrong! Of my sixteen years that I lived before coming to this place, not once did I hear the words like ‘Personal connect’, ‘Being there’, ‘Trust’, ‘Dependency’, etc. Had I told, say, my cousin that I trust you to be there when I need you and that somehow I’m dependent on you, he would fire back with “Baigan. Kaike toh bhi baataN karre yaaroN?” (translates into ‘Dude! (uhm, literally ‘Brinjal’) What bullshit are you even speaking?’

Now, that’s what this place is all about. It sounds melodious when we claim that we are so far from the city that we’re a civilization in itself. Well, maybe we are. But we’re one disgustingly fake civilization. You win a moot here and you’ll have way more number of people become jealous of you than appreciate you, in spite of their ‘Yipeee, you’re a stud!’ wall posts you’ll have on your Facebook wall. You win an open challenge and the teams you managed to defeat in those rounds will wish and pray that you face a miserable loss at the actual moot. And no, the MPL rankings make no sense within the campus, even though you’ll go around bragging about them when you’re interning.

From the CGPAs to the elections, it’s all about you being in the limelight and getting all the accolades rather than appreciating someone else for doing well at what they did. Last semester, one of my batchmates, who figures in the list of top rankers of my batch, had asked me if there’s any sport he can play just to get a certificate out of it so as to add it to his CV. He was meticulous in telling me that he can devote ninety minutes every day for the same. That’s what we are. We don’t do things because we ‘like’ them. We do them because the world would throw accolades for doing them. Yes, he wanted Rhodes and, oh God! I shall jump into a pool of ants if he gets something like that.

We can fake each and every virtue that exists in this world. Every single one except for ‘modesty’. No, that’s nowhere to be found here. All the ‘catching ups’ and ‘going on a walk’ to develop a ‘personal bonding’. (I guess we can make a lexicon of NALSAR jargon!). All of that shit is much far from being genuine. Something happens to you and you need people around you so that you can ‘talk about it’. You need people to ‘vent out your frustration’ if something’s wrong. This place does teach a lot about ‘survival’. But not without people. You start talking to people about your life so much that if something goes wrong, you can hardly do without ‘talking’ to them about it. You make yourselves so weak as a person that the ‘survival’ this place teaches you itself turns out to be fake.

However, all of this ain’t fool proof. I guess a fake world filled with fake goodness isn’t so much to complain of. But this world we spend half a decade in does have periodical lapses. There’s a bitch called ‘ego’ which thrives in every mind, body and soul (and also in every part that can move by itself 😛 ). The superiority complex is so much that if you crack a joke and no one laughs, you’d would put in every bit of creativity to throw another one and make up for it. All this, because it hurts. It hurts badly when the curtains of fakeness are raised. And hence, you would rather have people showing phony concern than have real people who don’t give a damn. When one of my batchmates had passed away, I could see a few countable souls who were unfeignedly aggrieved. All others were engaged in deploying some or the other means to show to the world that theirs was the biggest loss in his departure. (Rest in peace, my friend. Look down and smile at us for we are the bastards of the first order!)

No! We won’t change. We’ve come up with such arduous unwritten and unspoken rules that they’ve begun to rule us. I used to love roaming on the flag road, after dinner, with a set of loud people. But not anymore. It’s sometimes laboriously difficult to find if someone’s being true or not. And considering what it takes to fit it into this disillusioned civilization, I’d rather sit in my room and meditate. Yes, I love to sit alone in a corner during the classes rather than act like I care about every random bucko. I’m at least genuinely happy with what I do. Ah! Minority, only this time – by choice! 😛