Bond Busted - Part One

Prologue -

As a few of you are privy to the fact, this topic was to take the form of poetry. However, with all due respect, knowing the levels of comprehension of this language amidst the target readership to be pretty ordinary, I decided to abort poetry and write this up in prose - a form more coherent and precise. I know it would still require a consorted mental effort on the part of those reading it to understand it completely but where's the fun in writing without employing tedious words and reading without your mouth open and forehead all sweaty? Besides, the richness of the vocabulary gives me a very effective cover hiding underneath which I can take guarded shots at several people. The thick and the uninitiated will be confounded and the ones embroiled in the business will exhibit queer pupil reactions at frequent intervals. By the end of this article, the status will be somewhat like - 'Samajne waale samaj gaye hain, jo na samjhe woh anadi hai'...

Caution - It is very likely that if you don't belong to my college, that you would be able to make neither head nor tail of this write-up. I strongly recommend that you don't waste your time going through it.

BOND BUSTED

The tagline on the top of this page claims quite callously - 'Words and ideas can change the world'. Inspite of having about 60 posts already under my blogging belt, this will probably be the first time I am putting the tagline into action. The success of this post will not be measured by the compliments or hits I receive, or the number of ten-letter words I use in it - it will be measured by the changes it actualizes and the thought processes it provokes in the target reader's mind. Its the kind of success difficult to both achieve and evaluate but with my hands free at the moment and mind desperate to unleash its arsenal, I thought this would be the best and only time I can pen this down.

It all began on the first day of August 2007. Empty but sharp minds packaged in an wide assortment of bodies and coming from an equally wide assortment of places were brought together under a roof called the 'PDU Medical College'. The course they were to pursue was an elite one called the MBBS - medicine for the layman. No one knew what was to happen in the next four and a half years that they were to be together. The safety of their parents' docks were long gone - their boats had now entered unchartered waters which by common opinion, looked pretty frightening. But brave sailors they were...and they set forth with gutso onto what has been so far an enchanting journey...

I could go on for pages and pages if I want to - but as the title of this page suggests, this post will only deal with the reason why the batch called Bond didn't in fact - bond. The solitary purpose would be to bring out the fragilities that made our batch so brittle that it busted in the brief period of 29 months. What acted as the ignition and what acted as the fuel in the demonic act that has led to the social fabric of this batch being in flames? Why is it that daggers fly where flowers of friendship should be blooming? Why is it that some heads start boiling at the very name of some others? I confess beforehand that what you read from here on will be highly sensationalized and embedded in the moulds of customary literary exaggeration - but try to look beyond the words and catch the meaning hidden within them. Only then will the purpose of this text be served.

For most part of the first year, I was an ostrich. My head was buried in the sand and foliage of the trio of Anatomy, Physiology and Biochemistry - falsely assuming that by avoiding seeing the doings of others, my own doings will be correspondingly ignored. The assumption was short-lived and later, I had delved into the 'happenings' of the batch - with lesser gutso than many but sufficient enough to know what's going on. And what went on had turned nasty right from the very start. Why can't a person look upon another as a fellow man - individual and unique - beyond all scales of comparision? Why are people - within minutes of coming in contact with - categorized into superiors, inferiors and equals? You can't be close to one and all but it certainly is a good idea to be civil and courteous to all as long as they don't harm you. In the fertile soil of these false notions - and with the hybrid manure of regional bias, caste categorization and after a short while, academic segmentation - were the first seeds of disunity sown. Watered by seniors and batchmates alike, the crop has already grown, been harvested and poisoned everyone save a few.

In the first year, I vaguely remember the notions held then. Our college was quite orthodox in character - the two genders took the form of a mixture and not a compound, as chemistry students would prefer to distinguish. The first forays into the science of gender amalgamation were probably made with our batch. It would be unreasonable to comment on whether these forays were right or wrong - but in my opinion, they were certainly too premature. And even that would have been okay had there not been high-handedness from one end and countering envy from the other. The swords were drawn and the swordsmen forced to take sides at a duel between two very enterprising people at the boys' hostel. To make an already interesting face-off more interesting the more domineering of the girls got involved. From the very next day, the more observant amongst us could make out subtle changes in the hierarchy of the class. People 'warmed up' to some and became 'cold' to others. Requests for phone numbers were rejected and the subsequent issues blown up. Some were shown a cold shoulder for a frivolous attempt at forging so-called friendships. But, the college was not the major scene of action - it was the hostel and the hot spots of Rajkot city. Hearts had begun to flutter...a few had already taken off in early flight and those few quite predictably were destined to crash. And then there were the parties! Oh, and what a big issue they made. A section of people, many of them having fluttering hearts, got all glitzy and went off to parties. The other ones, largely because they could do nothing else, scoffed at them and arranged their own pathetic imitations of enjoyment. A few of the fluttering hearts - the lucky ones and the wise ones - soared and then crashed. The rest directly crashed. As of now, I am not aware of any of those fluttering hearts still in flight. The section which partied had their own problems - even within them people began scheming - some to get to play the ringmaster and others to bring those ill-fated fluttering hearts to somehow click and be a success. The divas, the damsels, the dudes, the vamps and the lambs - and mark my words, all had a fair representation - soon decided that partying was even worse than smoking for health and stopped. The intensive cardiac care units - which exclusively looked after the ailing hearts that had fluttered and then crashed - were permanently shuttered. The breeze of romance was over-powered by the gale of academics as the internal exams swooped in. The party people parted - and that section regretfully is still in parts. The other section had by then managed to convince themselves that they were the mighty ones. With a mindset not very different from the Valentine Day's saffron patrol brigade, they embarked on their own journey of infatuations and insinuations. But their glee at the dispersion of their flashy counterparts was short-lived as problems began frequenting them too. With their narrow minds already cluttered with envy, their inflating egos could hardly be accommodated and they too went by the-then usual routine of self-destruction. As days progressed, the situation improved. The disbanded and the disheartened sought and found sympathy from each other. In their golden run to self-destruction, they had already organized a grandiose tour to proximal destinations and angered a sadist teacher quite famous for wreaking havoc on students. Havoc it was indeed - and people trembled when the Physiology class became an exhibition of manslaughter. But time made that a routine too. All was well - or at least as well as the situation permitted.

The venue of the next act - Baroda. My hometown and where Gujarat's largest medical students' celebration meet is held in April under the name of 'Vibrant' by the city's medical college. A sizeable consignment from our college, including me eager to rush home, landed in Baroda. The spirit of celebration and the tension-free atmosphere had hypnotized all. As the motley group from Rajkot wandered together - in auditoriums and gardens, malls and mountains - they began to seal their differences. The intensive cardiac care units became temporarily operational again - and the romantic and the infatuated saw a silver lining once again. People were allowed to be indiscreet and rude. In a frivolous truth-and-dare game, many bold advances were made. I was absent from most of the scene of action but the happenings did reach my ears. Back to Rajkot, the class sunk back into torpor once again. A few egos clashed every now and then. There were already a few people who could be readily pin-pointed as the 'usual culprits' - those not amenable to socializing and whose ballooning egos got often busted by roughshod handling. As we will see later, these earth-bound misfits would be playing a major role in the next round of college politics.

Till the end of first year, we were onto ourselves. In the second year, we saw a fresh fleet of angels and demons descending on our lands - a species called 'Seniors'. Most of us were chronologically shocked, disoriented, pupeteered, reoriented and then thrust into the nasty world of college politics. They said it was about power - the power to stand your ground, the power to decide and choose, the power to fix and unfurl your own flag in a heterogenous terrain. What you do would decide who you are. We were impressed - maybe even awed. I didn't understand then and I still haven't figured out now - what one is to do with that power. Looking long distance it doesn't even seem to qualify as a power. But we were asked to develop it and we tried our level best. We had two opportunities to exhibit how far we had succeeded - the Freshers' Party was the battle and the Annual Function was the war. In the brief respite between the two, we had a honeymoon - another class trip to Rajasthan. What happened in the trip was a sophisticated version of what happened in the first year - like Sanjay Leela Bhansali's glamourous and glorious version of the same age-old story of Devdas. Some people made new friends. Some renewed old friendships. Some friendships progressed to the darned status of fluttering hearts. Preceding the trip was a week full of 'Day Celebrations'. Most of them were enjoyable - the political influence was very low. Of course, concepts like the Chocolate Day are designed to poke and jab the already established relations into something more exciting but all in all, nothing unexpected happened. The trip and what preceded it did bring a lot many people out of shell and they began to take a renewed interest in what was happening in the class. Thus, for all practical purposes all it did was to raise the stakes for the war that was come.

And much worse than a war it was...the disaster we had fondly christened one fine morning as 'Spandan'....

***Part 1 ends here***

For the second part of this sequence, click here.