The indifferent college student-An insider's perspective

WARNING:This post was written in a moment of immense despair and a personal low.It might not be a good read for you, it might be crap. But to me, it signifies something that I went through.I do not want to erase it from my life just because it wasn't good. So this post stays put!


‘College!’-I have always fancied being in one when I was a school-going kid. The fun, the carefree days, the not having to wear uniforms – all these things that are inseparable from the image of college life were irresistible to me. All the mugging, tuitions, board exams, entrance exams, and finally, here I am in a professional college! I see all that I had expected and envisioned but I also see more…
Hey wait! There seems to be something odd about this place. Why do I feel like an alien here? Is it something with me or is it something with the rest of the people? The more I try to see what my peers see, the more blurred my vision gets. As I try to grope in the darkness, I see faint images of men and women all excited. The very little that I can hear of their conversation hardly helps me in comprehending the situation. ‘Hey guys, there’s this movie hitting the theatres today!’ ‘You know, he proposed last week. Lets party!!’ ‘ I got this new outfit which that actress sports in her new movie’. The pitch gets higher and higher and so does the excitement. Though I understand the words, I don’t seem to gather what they’re all excited about. Confused and perplexed, I come back to my room. The music is loud, there are Sheldons and tattered Mills and Boons strewn around, the tap in the wash is open and nobody seems to have a problem with the> overflowing water. ‘Oh God! What do I suffer from? I am so lost in this place’
Parents and friends from back home advise me to try and get along with my college mates. I put in all efforts and participate in their conversations, I go to movies with them, I try to party the way they do; but I always feel suffocated at the end of the day. I am unable to read the novels that they read, unable to discuss guys, love or movies for hours together. I end up having fights; get branded as a haughty person and ….I keep shifting rooms.
One fine day, I decide to stop trying and take sometime off. The mood is somber and that of retrospection. I realize some thing that I had failed to see all along. These people do not care for things happening around them. It doesn’t matter if people get killed, if their very own air and water get polluted; as long as it doesn’t happen to them, they really don’t care! And even if it is happening to them, they are not aware of it. As one of them puts it ‘I don’t care if thousands of people get killed in the process of me making money. I can’t go out of my way to help people live. Ultimately, if they survive and I don’t, it doesn’t make any sense!’ Their idea of helping the society is to donate some money and their old, torn clothes during natural calamities. There ends their social responsibility. To them, distributing sweets to orphaned kids is the best possible charity. I also realize that they have never been able to see what I see. I looked up these symptoms in my own medical dictionary and was really alarmed. These were the signs of an epidemic that could be highly detrimental to the society and the youngsters were a particularly vulnerable group. I scrolled down the page and found the name of this disease that they suffer from - 'Indifference!'
So after all, it was not me who was diseased all these days. Thank God, I am immune…

A journey towards discovery

Bunking college, a bunch of lies to mom… and there I was, on my way to Cuddalore.For a sea loving person that I am, the journey along the coastline was a joy in itself. The articles that we (me and laks) read, the documentaries that we had seen and the first hand accounts by shweta had made us believe that we knew enough about the problems in Cuddalore. We were in for a shock the moment our auto entered the SIPCOT area. After all, we hadn’t known the intensity of the problem all this while! If there exists a word that could describe the stench of the place, I just didn’t know it…
Holding our breaths, we reached the Sangolikuppam village. We were there to be a part of the art workshop for the children of the Government school by Blodsow. As we approached the school with the mental picture of a typical Government school, we were greeted by the bright blooms of a very ‘green’ and well maintained structure. The children were amazing, given the circumstances and the surroundings in which they live. They were all bubbly, eager to learn and waiting to exhibit their talents. The kids were too happy to dig into mud and splash it on their charts. Later when Blodsow and the rest of us tried to talk to the kids about industrial pollution, they came out with their own experiences, how their parents have been affected and the time when they went without food for days in a row. We weren’t ready for such a matter of factly, plain talk from those young minds. But in a way, it was comforting to know that these kids understood the problem and had a strong hatred for the industries that were playing with their lives. We wound up for the day and the kids would let us go only if we promised to come back the next day.
Traveling back to the town through the same stench, we reached our hotel rooms just in time to crash. When we woke up after about four hours in the evening, we had a horrible headache, a burning sensation down the windpipe and an aching stomach- this was the effect of half-a-day spent in the beautiful but unfortunate village. I was afraid to imagine the health problems that the pollution would have caused in people who lived there permanently.
The next day, we went to the riverbed in the village. We were spellbound by the beauty of the place. Nobody would expect that beautiful river to be polluted with the untreated effluents, acids and other wastes from the industries. But there it was, flowing calm and serene, holding tones of toxic pollutants within, threatening the very lives of the fishermen and anybody else who would dare to touch its waters. When a boatman showed us his hands with the skin and some flesh eaten away by the toxins in the water, we were too horrified to react…..the worst part was that he expected the rest of it to be eaten away too, revealing the bones soon! What on the earth has befallen their way? I could think of no logic or reason why the authorities fail to acknowledge the plight of these communities. The villages here are also deprived of drinking water supply with all the ground water being polluted. They’ve virtually lost everything that would sustain a living- their lands are no more cultivable, their water and air are polluted and there are no fishes in the river. But the fighting spirit keeps them going….
With a heavy heart, we went back to the school to meet the kids. They were taught to sketch with charcoal over the mud background on their charts. Almost every kid drew things that were related to industrial pollution. The teachers of the school are doing a great job, educating these children in the best possible way. Every child plants a sapling and takes care of the plant as it grows. The pride in their faces as they took us around the garden to show their plant that had just flowered, when they sang the songs that they knew, and their dance that they were rehearsing for the annual day can hardly be described. It was their time to ‘show off’!
I was talking to the Headmistress of the school, when she said ‘These kids used to fight a lot, beat up each other and were very difficult to handle; but the gardening routine has helped hem overcome their violent nature. They now have a sense of responsibility and patience’. The teachers also put in their own money to teach these kids yoga and dance. In all, they have initiated a process that heals the anger in these kids. Kudos to these dedicated people!
When we left the village, we were a little wiser. We silently resolved to go back, to work with those wonderful people and to learn………….

http://www.sipcotcuddalore.com/updates_130305.html