All In A Day’s Work

The duties and responsibilities of a technical lecturer comprises of teaching, instruction in laboratory, students assessment and evaluation, assisting in departmental administration and so on. Some may think teaching is a boring and dull profession but the truth is that the nearer one is to the youth, the more exciting life/job is. Now before I narrate an incident you must know that I work in a private college and many influential people’s sons & daughters study on management quota. Few days ago, over a girl; boys of two different streams (IT and Mech) had a fight which led to serious injury to one of the boys (Mech). Police came to arrest the main accused (IT) and our Jt.Director of college is said to have slapped him too. But the student turned out to be the nephew of a big politician and somehow construed the slap as politically motivated. So on 6th Aug around 100-150 boys (goons??) came to college and wrecked the administrative building. They even hit the Jt.Director with stick and manhandled the Chairman and Director. We all thought the repercussion had ended there.

But on 8th Aug, 25 people including the leader of local Rozgaar Sena (an offset of Shiv Sena) came and vandalized the Mech.Deptt building while brandishing sticks and swords. Unfortunately my Deptt. too is in the same building. They broke window panes of each and every classroom, lab and staff room. All the students and staff were scared out of their wits. As soon as the situation sunk in, the students were agitated and started chasing the Shiv Sainiks or shall I say hooligans. The leader and another guy were caught while the rest escaped. The angry students beat them up and set one of their vehicles ablaze. Meanwhile all the students found bamboo sticks (1st year induction program had been held on 7th) and started behaving as protectors, patrolling the different buildings and waiting at each building’s entrance in case the Shiv Sainiks return with more people as they had threatened. But ofcourse I feel some students were just having a field day! Not to attend classes and to let loose their testosterone is every student’s dream day. 🙂 Some even had altercation with the Sainiks waiting outside the college gate. But by then police had arrived and were prepared to do lathi charge if the situation didn’t calm down. But it did. The Sainiks left and after a while students and staff were allowed to leave.

The leader denied destruction of property on camera and in papers. He said they had come to ask about the college’s stance on giving admission to locals/ST/SC/OBCs. But actually he inquired about this and then trashed the whole Mech block while shouting slogans. Here is a slideshow of the pictures of destruction. Hover the mouse over the pictures to see the captions.

So dears, don’t underestimate the teaching profession. Fighting goons and protecting students from anti social elements are all in a day’s work!! Seriously speaking, even be it a social calamity, I think the correct procedure to handle any emergency situation without panic and stampede is unknown to most people in India. One more thing I observed is the effect of rumor in an already tense situation. I also got to see some aspects of crowd and riot psychology.