[Reader-list] Sarai / Independent Fellow 2007/ Nalin N. Mathur/ First Posting

[Nalin Mathur]

Hello All,

Here I am with the first posting for my work, titled "B - Grade Engineering
College Culture. I am an engineer with an IT major and am glad to be a part
of something that's completely new and exciting.

My project deals with Engineering colleges which are often located at random
small town suburbs or off a highway milestone. They manifest interesting and
fantastical cultural dynamics wherein a mix of identities, cultures and
aspirations are played out in non-metropolitan spaces to get an amalgamation
of different worlds in one campus. What perhaps remains common right from
the start is the collective detachment to small towness and the promise of
moving out and making it big in the real big city.


I am interested to research and document:

a) How these aspects affect ones politics, conscience, personhood.

b) How these experiences influence and form the outlook towards the world at
large or view points nurtured here during the four years of a students stay.

Given below is the abstract which originally was a part of the initial
proposal I had mailed to Sarai.

"A boy must leave home in order to become a Man". I had been stuck by this
saying way before Paulo Coelho's Santiago became a cultural phenomenon. I
had no doubt that I would prefer staying away from home during my
engineering, another thing about which I was sure I would do. Being unable
to secure a decent enough rank in engineering colleges in Delhi further
helped the cause. With the limited options that I had, my parents decided
upon a college in Mathura, the place was known and was only three hours from
Delhi.



For a Delhi born and bread, Mathura was another world. A busy highway was
the only indication of it being connected to the world outside. Being
brought up in the restricted environment of an expensive school, this change
in habitat came as a rude shock. The mental preparation for an occurrence
like this was my only savior. I was lucky enough to have great room mates,
their foremost qualification was them hailing from Delhi. Over all it felt
like I was not in Nostradamus's good books and I could easily predict four
rough years ahead. By now I realized that I am not at IIT and this is what I
call B-GRADE Engineering College culture.



It was not long before I realized how wrong I was. My class comprised of an
interesting mix of students from Punjab and Delhi. The bulk was from UP. And
even though it was a coed college, there was no girl in our class!
Inevitably, I came in contact with people from different backgrounds and
forged lasting friendships. I started playing for their teams, developed a
taste for their kind of music, visited their homes during vacations and upon
completion of our degree, joined the same company. The initial skeptic
approach towards people with whom I didn't relate transformed into respect.
The 'their' became 'my'.



By the time the first semester was over and I returned home to meet fellow
school mates who had joined different engineering colleges at different
places in India and abroad, I had a lot of stories to share. Some
experiences we realized were very similar. Claustrophobia turned into liking
was the moral of all stories. To my surprise, soon I started looking forward
for the college to reopen. There were instances when I did not come home on
vacations and stayed in college, bad food withstanding.



Not necessarily for the sake of nostalgia, but the last days at college made
me look back as to what one has achieved over a period of these four years.
>From food habits to dressing sense to outlook towards life, I was a changed
man, with a distinctive UP touch, which was only subdued by polished
English. On a broader scale my Bengali friends in South religiously
celebrated Onam and those in Lucknow didn't drink during Ramzan. This
gradual change can only be attributed to a phase of social renaissance which
unavoidably crops up and has profound effect on individualism. This is what
I aim to study.

I am looking forward to your suggestions and comments.

Warmly,

Nalin N. Mathur
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