Department of Communication Studies, University of Pune

In a former life, my name was GM Ma’am. For a full three years. I used to teach at my beloved DCS – the place that I spent a wonderful two years getting my post-graduate degree in communication and three bitter-sweet years teaching. DCS was an experience. I entered having fled from the promise of a secure MBA seat into the uncertainty of the media profession. I had a plethora of self-doubts, loads of confidence issues, and a  bad case of inferiority complex that I was hoping nobody would detect. The only thing that I was sure of was that I loved to read, ask questions, wanted to write and did not want to be anywhere near the allegedly regimented horrors of an MBA. I wanted to be free to think and experience the world that I always looked at eagerly from behind the despairs of untallied balance sheets and profit and loss accounts of my undergraduate days.

 

By the time I passed out of DCS, I hadn’t conquered all of it, but I was learning to deal with them. It gave a 23-year-old me the tentative confidence to return a year later as a full-time faculty member to teach people very much my peers in age even though public speaking filled me with dread. I guess that is what a good master’s degree from any institute is all about. It gives you the chance to explore and gives you the confidence to tread on to newer paths. DCS may not be the best institute in terms of placement and infrastructure. Like most public universities, it has its share of problems that frustrate teachers and students alike. Especially, when you have the Symbiosis brand name to compete with in your own backyard. Yet, everyone who enters leaves a better person and a more successful person. DCS has some well-known names from the news, TV and film industries on its alumni rosters. Their struggle and eventual success is testimony to what DCS gave them. Not a job on a placement cell facilitated platter, but the will and the confidence to sniff one out, hunt it down, and taste sweet success in. Let’s face it. Any institute can take the cream of the crop and send them on their way to success, but it is the institute that takes in the ones who deserve a chance and may not have gotten it in the crazy commercial market of higher education or utopian ideas of merit, that is deserving of the applause. DCS is that institute. It is a charming little place, one that I am the proudest to have belonged to from the total bulk of my academic life. In ways both big and small it contributed towards helping me along life and my heart bursts with pride whenever I think of it.

 

One of the hallmarks of the DCS experience is the sheer range of people you have to interact with during your study. Like most universities, admissions are strictly based according the reservation policies. While I firmly believe that reservations are not the answer to the caste problem; thanks to it, the kind of students who enter and the dynamics between them make for an interesting comment on India’s caste and class hierarchies and the breadth of its diversity, beauty, and ugliness. From that girl who prided herself on her high-caste Brahmin status and her Marathi accented albeit fluent English to that poor boy from that remote village who could make it to a big city like Pune only because there was that reservation quota to that very middle class girl trying hard to find her place in the world and worried she is going to fail spectacularly.  DCS, sees them all.

 

They all have to occupy the same space. They are forced to deal with prejudices and struggle with wanting to be seen as politically correct even while they completely fail to hide their true opinions of each other. Mostly, classes settle down into becoming an amazingly cohesive unit who learn to appreciate their differences and learn about life as much outside the classroom as inside. It helps that its fees are the most affordable off all the mass media institutes by virtue of being a state university. It also helps that admissions are open to graduates from any discipline – which makes for an interesting inter-disciplinary mix of students on its own. It also helps that dealing with a subject such as communication, means that you are exposed to so much of the world that you would have never encountered during your undergraduate days studying chemistry or commerce or economics.

 

So D was one of those students. He came from a background in the performing arts and was from a small town. As a teacher, he was the stuff nightmares are made of. He was insolent and carried a chip on his shoulder – both of the arrogance of being an ‘actor’ and the arrogance of being a self-proclaimed communist from a small town who thinks that the English speakers and those of the big towns know nothing about life the way he does and experiences. On the few occasions, he would attend my class, he would make it a point to enter late only because he knew it would annoy me. He would laugh in your face if you asked him to leave. All in all he was that boy whom I never missed and forgot all about when I left DCS.

 

Until a couple of days ago when someone in our alumni group left a link asking people to vote for an alumn who was now on a reality show on a channel. I did not recognize the name at first. D apparently has dropped his last name and goes by some another name. Maybe, he finds it more cooler and hipper than his last name. From the videos that I watched online, he seems to have shed none of his insolence. But, there was that one video that will tell you more about D than anything else. In that video he is attempting to explain to his roommate the complexities of the Indian caste system and what it means to be a lower caste. While most of his other videos see him speaking in Hindi, he narrates the caste hierarchies and their roles in halting English. Maybe, he wanted to prove a point to his roommate who is a fluent English speaker himself. It was the only of his videos where D really was being himself and not putting on an act. There is a strange vulnerability to him and his narration there. It offered me a glimpse into this troublemaking student’s personality that I had never seen before. I wonder what route he took after he passed out of DCS. Whatever he did, in the big bad world of Mumbai city, he overcome enough challenges of the cut-throat media industry to finally make it on television with a chance to display his acting skills. In a place where everyone will fight and fight hard and dirty to make it, he made it in front of the camera and on television. He was eliminated by the public shortly after his spiel on the caste system. Yet, in his own way, D is a star for having risen through the ranks and his refusal to let his lack of urban sophistication stand in the way of going after his dreams.

 

You can argue that it is his innate personality that got him this far. And that won’t be far from the truth, but somewhere lurking behind all of that, is the mark of that DCS classroom (or really the university canteen) that gave D that chance to earn that master’s degree, to act in his fellow classmates’ student film productions, the chance to direct his own two student films, to go after his dreams, to make those friends who cared enough to publicize his entry on to that show, and that extended alumni network who may have voted for his stay on the show simply because he is a DCSian.

 

Plus, there is also that ‘teacher’ who thought him a complete rascal but is writing about him nonetheless.