E-Paper
Dilemma of a student
Never feel hesitant to get your doubts cleared by professors, writes Annie Datta in our regular series From the Varsity.
To be a student these days in no way means being naïve and innocent. That would be to invite epithets like timid and shy. This is what happened to some Japanese students at the campus. So, it is well inferred that when you enter the class you enter with a loud apology for being late “My cat you know… I had to be at the Vet” as if the class and the professor were waiting precisely to know about the health of tabby. Follow interruptions to the lesson in hand through subjective recollections like “My childhood Barbie doll whose head I chopped off in a fit of frenzy” said simply in order to participate in a discussion on the subject of child violence. It doesn’t matter what you talk so long as you talk — mundane or morbid. And this determines your survival in the classroom.
It helps you get popular among professors who mistake it for a real urge in the student to learn a foreign language. It was all smooth going before this doll-slaying, feline-loving student made her presence felt in the class. She is about to gel into a type. Prior to her entry, there was more teaching and greater participation. All participated equally. But now one hears our new friend’s voice reverberating in the classroom, drowning all other voices in its wake. The hesitant Asian in particular dare not protest or squeak a word that would not make sense to Miss Know-all. Her ironic looks and sarcastic smirk is enough to shut your mouth up forever and roll you back into a complex. She seems to know everything including the language she intends to learn. For a student like me, this is positive nuisance. Having established the tempo with which lessons are to be delivered, she suddenly decides to drop out of the course. So what exactly did she want in the first place? We had been told earlier that this bold and beautiful arrival from abroad was here to stay put having sold off her property before migrating to a new identity of a student.
It is not the first time I have encountered this new class of so-called university students. Back home in the University of Delhi, I had to sit alongside fully fledged saffron-robed monks who had wandered into the Department of Philosophy in search of enlightenment. The professor behind the desk could be seen dazed by the presence of such over-aged luminaries in his class. Pitiably enough, my naïve looks made me a favourite target of the professor’s philosophically searching queries.
