'Sarkar'ed!

Big day for the final jury arrived. An over confident bunch of students dressed up all bright, ready with their mile long sheets stuffed in with countless pie charts and colorful maps, anxious to meet their jury, lined up in the classroom. An old man entered the class with a forced cold smile, and stared at the minions before him, all set to tear upon them. His name was Sarkar, and he brought along this tall guy who looked lost and totally out of place. After the formal introduction, it was announced the individual jury will be held first. An enthusiastic Bhaskar sir was running around making sure we were all prepared, not that he really cared about us, but he was trying to build a reputation for himself, and what else could he ask for than an opportunity to show off his kids to the Associate Professor of Traffic and Transportation Department of SPA Delhi?

One by one, the lambs went into the lion's den. We heard no screams, thought everything was going well, and that's when my turn came. Took a deep breath and walked in, sat in front of him, proudly spread out my portfolio of sheets I had finally managed to complete the previous day. He seemed least bothered about my work, my hours of continuous misery with photoshop creating all those sheets out of thousand rows and columns of excel data.

"What are the attributes of network characteristics?"

"Err..who sir?"

"What book do you refer?"

"Kadiyali.."

“WHO IS KADIYALI? He was my colleague! He is not the only author for transportation studies! DO YOU WANT ME TO CALL HIM NOW?"

"Err...?"

"This won't be enough! You need to work hard... Good luck."

And, I walked out of the den, heartless, totally 'boosted up' for the group jury that was coming next.

And before I know, I was standing before him again, this time I wasn't alone. Borrowing Rajiv's word, we stood up before him in a row, while he loaded his gun, brandished it, and aimed at us.

"Who is going to start?" asked the man with gun.

"Sir", I stepped forward. "Our aim is to study the parking demand and existing supply to differentiate out the deficit demand, and cater to it through our strategies. Our objective was to blah and blah and blah..."

"That's not an objective!" He fired his first shot.

"Sir, we have followed this methodology..."

"Nonsense!"

That was it, he began firing at us bullets after bullets of questions, we struggled hard dodging and defending them for a while, hopeless, as we finally surrendered, taking the blows one after another, to become the first martyrs of the jury. While we were being thrown to our graves, we saw Bhaskar sir entering the hall, saw the panic of realization on his face, all the hefty surveys out on the road under burning sun, all the data entries of where people were going and how much it was costing them, all the colourful sheets that had adorned the studio walls, and all the presentations of IRC and regulations and norms, for the last 6 months, were all hopelessly decapitated - 'Sarkar'ed...

(Background music: Time- Hans Zimmer)

At the end of the day, while our executioner was reminding us for the last time how much of dumb heads we were, I remember an emotional Bhaskar sir saying, "I wouldn't compare you with master students, but for the work done by 2nd year bachelor students, you have done exceptionally well." And that was the last time we saw him in the campus.