"Very tragic, anyway, you XYZ, you come and stand in front of the class and tell us all about what exactly happened and what is the state of affairs at present." -- A Professor at IIT Kgp, two days after the "rampage".
I am sorry. I feel this is even more tragic coming from somebody who belongs to the honorable community of "teachers". Since the dark sunday that we struggled past, I have been inundated by blog posts, news links, forwarded emails - all (naturally) telling a novel version of the tale that unfolded before my eyes.
I shall not say that I am a witness, I am a victim. Make no mistake, I am not saying that I am a potential victim, I am indeed a victim. Brought up in a country where justice wears out with shoe soles running from desk to desk, I feel vanquished not by The System, I feel trampled by us.
Three days later, this may seem coming as a late reaction, I decided to take the liberty on my personal space in the cyber world to come out with another version.
Chatting at leisure with an alumna living seven seas away in Australia, I was jolted out of my wits to learn of the demise of a fellow student. On being passed on the social profile link my horror jumped unbound to realise that he was an acquaintance.
Whether or not he had a history of epilepsy is immaterial here. He died of sustained head injuries while returning from a visit to the joke of a hospital (with Technology tagging in between to make it even more ludicrous) that we have in campus. Bidhan Chandra Roy Technology Hospital (BCR). Perhaps his only fault was to have dreamed, and have realised it by getting in to the most glorified of all IITs- IIT Kharagpur.
I do not want to restate the story of manslaughter by those under Hypocrate's Oath for it has become stimulating tea-time debate and discussion to the level that is nauseating. Or perhaps I am just being "sensitive" because I knew the deceased somehow. But, incase you are still unaware, or wish to peek in for the truth, almost as it is/was, you may follow
http://scholarsavenue.blogspot.com/2009/03/explanations.html (The online campus newspaper, perhaps our only authentic comprehension of the happenings around.)
I am ehausted, both physically from running from one gathering to another meeting and arguing with (wo)men who find "violence" bewildering,- and emotionally, for everytime the hullabaloo settles, silence hits me with the horrific reality that transpired. I am not a part of any elite intellectual group. I am just one of those who have lived almost half a decade here, at the receiving end always, and I am have been questioned of the morality or the lack of it by kids (way younger than me at 18 or 19, right the age that Rohit was) in the acts of (suppressed) negligence and (much publicised) acts of vandalism.
And so it did happen.
And then there were questions, some of which had been asked many a times before. And as is the norm, there was nobody to answer. Or if did someone appear to grace the "occassion", there were smirks and sympathies flying in the air. "What is the big deal?" I believe a lot of us, who haven't been directly affected would either laugh it for a few moments or just brush this comment aside. But for the ones who lost a dear friend? Does the honorable Czar here have these very guts to go and offer the same sympathies to the deceased's family? What if the Czar lost his prince? Would it have been a big deal for him after all?
On afterthought, an intelligent friend of mine justified this as "poor PR skills". Concise. To the point. Condensed.
Stones were pelted, abusive slogans were thrown at the top of voices, property damaged, the Czar criminalized (or rather by intelligent guages, "victimised"), FORCED to resign. With a number of the Czar's ministers standing and watching the destruction with an equal smirk on their faces, IITians were expected to have been rational. Rational in demands and in thoughts.
Then came the ordeal of calming everyone down, all four hours later, when the angry ones suddenly melted to a candle light march, an intermittent sign of protest. an acting student body was conjured up, repeating issues that was already being placed before a "committee" that was sitting for a "meeting".
In IIT Kharagpur, the largest of all the IIT communities, 2008 saw the inception of a concept that tried to listen to student grievances. So we meet again, in an open farce, two thousand or more of us, demanding more resignations. What apalled me was not just a mere apathy of the chief ministers of the Czar, it was there antipathy when each of them began with "Dear Students" (ofcourse we now know how particularly dear we are to them) and shamelessly ended with a "Thank You" (Yes, you do need to thank us for not having shown you to the fate that Rohit met?! Or is it an acknowledgment of us bearing with their pert somnambulist attitude towards our repeated requests?)
There were questions raised again, the usual ones of who, why, how and most importantly when. Every open house, till date, has ended in various ASAPs. We shall look in to it ASAP, we shall have a meeting regarding this ASAP, we will change the whole universe ASAP. 22nd March, 2009 ended with a few more ASAPs, new committees to be set up ASAP, enquiry commission ASAP, hospital ASAP, resignation ASAP... tell us how soon is as soon as possible? How soon is it possible to achieve ASAP? Nonetheless, the Chief Minister of the Subjects raised an accusing finger, dared his subjects to come forward, and they did come. But given the brittleness of the situation, it beats me what saved the Chief Minister of the Subject from losing the finger he raised. He finally contributed his bit to grace the "occassion" by shrugging off dust from his collar. Resignation. "Okay! I also resign." Yes I was there, standing a couple of meters away from the ministers.
The official press release following the cursed Sunday:
Rohit Kumar, a third year student of IIT Kharagpur, was regularly visiting the institute hospital since the last three days on account of chronic headaches. On his way back to the hostel on the third day he fainted and fell off a cycle rickshaw and sustained serious injuries.He was again rushed to the hospital, upon which it was decided that he should be taken to Kolkata. However, on the way, his situation deteriorated and he was instead taken to Midnapore, where he was unfortunately declared brought dead.
This incident triggered off strong emotive response from the students as they felt that the medical facilities were inadequate. The students immediately met the authorities and lodged their strong protest. The institute has expressed its condolences to Rohit’s family and friends. The administration took note of the issues and met the student general body and assured them and laid out a plan in which they would work together with the students towards improving on campus medical facilities.
:-)
When I marked these lines red, I realised, I wanted to highlight every line. Official indeed. This is what reached you, the ever committed, ever generous alumni of Kgp, and also the ones who have the power to build (or not to build) a hospital (or any infrastructural facility for that matter). And so commented one (and I had to single out from many such responses)
"I am 1998 Alumunus. For a while I worked in KGP too. I was shocked to learn of 22/3 at IIT Kgp.While I understand the students ire and anger I am ashamed that KGPians have indulged in destruction of property. I recall the terrible ragging incident in 1991 , when students went on hunger strike and protested and made the administration bend. This does not befit an IItian, who is considered a class apart from the usual engineering college students.
It is unclear why the Director was singled out? He is just taken over a year ago? What about the Deputy Director as the Hospital Commitee Chairman all these years? What has he done to improve the system? Nothing. While the Director's house was being ransacked and property destroyed , did any one of you think of the Director's wife, her plight and state of shock.
Me and my fellow IItians here in Banaglore, are still not able to come to terms that KGpians can be violent."
So, coming to the real scorching issues that has been criminalizing me for the past three days now:
- Was violence, property destruction and harassment of the Director and his family the IITian way of dealing with loss?
- Why was the Director singled out? And as very intelligently put by my close friend, the logic by which the Director is being held responsible applies equally to the CM of West Bengal, PM and the Honorable President of the Republic of India.
- And as I surfed from blog posts to posts, novelty struck me in the form of: "Do the 'elite' students of IIT might have a bigger need of medical facilities than an average Indian citizen?" (Lifted directly and hence I shirk any responsibility for the construct of the sentence and consequently the sense it may make to you.)
- This may escape you, so read as many times as you may need to to, YES. He/ they called for it. How many times (do we even have to have a count for it) have we protested silently? Last I remember it was condemning Illumination to protest. Who woke up? I went home to celebrate Diwali, so did most professors and their families. It is shameful that I have to type out a number for the catastrophes and deaths that BCR has thrust on us. Death of a student in an NSS camp - whatever may have been his medical history, did he even get an opportunity to have his failing breaths being checked up?
Oh come on, they fail us if we don't attend the draconian camp in a remote village, and they take almost two hundreds of us and they take not a doctor, just in case... just the case that happened. [FYI, we require to have the warden accompany us if we may want to go in a group of, say, 20 to a dinner (for which we are obliged to return to campus by 2300 hours) to as close as Malancha Road. Our safety is afterall their primary concern.]
Gathering as much as I could from the internet (I so hope I don't stumble on more), I learnt of the death of an M.Tech student at the hands of the BCR alchemists as late as in the 1990s. Who moved and what? Silent Protest? I am tempted to say BULL****. How many of us even got to know of these incidents?
I write this when one of my very close friends, Gaurav Tomar is fighting malignant malaria at Apollo Hospital in New Delhi. To be honest, ninety-five percent of the people present in campus would not have known about either what he and his family has had to fight, nor would we have known of the old hideous accounts of BCR diaries. At the most, the campus newspaper would have published it, a handful of alumni from Bangalore would have read and reacted by typing comments and a couple of more from Silicon Vally would have followed suit.
"Overturning a car", "breaking window panes and furniture", What's the big deal really?
- I would like to assume the liberty of explaining this in very local terms. Suppose that you are the head of a sports team (say for example, the Olympics team) participating in a cut-throat competition and your team flounders. You do not win. Who assumes the responsibility and faces the music? You? Or the Honorable President of the Republic of India?
It is indeed very easy for us to comment on the heinous nature of crime we have committed by picking out on a particular person when we are sitting comfortably in our cotton cushioned shells. Dear Shocked Sir/ Madam, thanks to your indignant callousness, another life was lost even after the 90s incident and one of my dear friends is undergoing dialysis. (http://scholarsavenue.targetiit.com/2009/03/24/the-sad-tale-of-another/)
- For a minute I thought I was way too tired to answer this, but then I thought that some of us really required this to be spoon fed too. My dear friend, we have been sent to IIT to study by our parents, not to some military camp. The director's earlier remarks in an earlier Open House meeting tantamounts to this "If you have eaten in Kgp hostel mess, you can survive anywhere
." If nothing, our admission brochure assures our guardians of a civic hospital (My turn to ).
Some of my more intelligent friends fired me a convoluted (and hence more intellectual) form of the question posed above, and I must say if there are remote villages in India that are starving for medical attention, they will have to fight for it harder, because as I said earlier, the rein holders of my country are even more reluctant somnambulists than the administrators in Kharagpur. You had jaundice, your parents came to your rescue, took you out and got you treated. Gaurav Tomar's parents thankfully could do that at the edge. What about the guardians and friends of those who couldn't survive longer to be given an opportunity to be served the same way? They may think of it as a "Big Deal". Frankly, you, the Ms. Shocked Ones, Mr. Bewildered Ones, it is because you got an opportunity to escape and comfortably forget that we lost Rohit.
Ironically enough, it took two years to get sanctioned and put up an Intellectual Property Law School on campus and it takes one more life, one seriously sick student and an angry mob to awaken the ones who impart knowledge to the IITians (the ones who are expected to be rational in their outlook).
For the long and short of it, the availability of medical amenities would have been equally beneficial to every member of the community, given that most ministers in the Czar's court have reached a ripe age where they are vulnerable of fatal medical emergencies. Would the Czar's heart have waited for him to reach Apollo Hospital, Kolkata? That would indeed have been a big deal. Or they could have facilitated the newly devised artificial heart (Made in IIT Kharagpur
