That’s me and my dad in class

It’s Mother’s Day, but fathers have been having their day at Delhi University for a while now: a group of fathers are courting college at the same time as their kids at DU. The university’s Faculty of Law boasts of at least four fathers who have been their children’s fellow students.

At Law Centre-I (LC-I), 52-year-old Beli Ram Kaundal attended classes to be close to his 20-year-old identical twins Vishal and Vikrant. He is his sons’ junior. Kaundal, Hamirpur’s sub-divisional magistrate, decided to do his LLB when his sons complained that they found Delhi “too harsh”. The trio made it to this year’s Limca Book. Says Vishal, “It was very reassuring when our father joined us. We would go out together after class many times.”

Rajendar Lal, 51, an accountant with the Ministry of Finance, joined LC-II a year after his 27-year-old daughter, Kusumlata cleared her entrance. His 25-year-old son Jeetender is also his LLB super-senior.

Then there’s 57-year-old N.M. Perumal, a Home Ministry director, who beat his daughter Lata, 27, to bag an LLB a year earlier. “I spent more time in the LC-II canteen than my daughter who is now writing her final exams,” he laughs.

It was a level playing field for 55-year-old Sudhir Kumar, a senior IAS officer and his 27-year-old son Suhas, who became batchmates in 2004. Suhas’s best friend from college, Aagney, ended up in Kumar Sr’s class — and became his best friend too. Now, Kumar Sr is all set to become Suhas’s senior at college, as the latter dropped out for a year.