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.
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