Polite-Tricks!

(This is neither an attempt to increase the no.of hits in this otherwise pretty non-existent blog, nor to increase the probability of me getting hits…this was written far before EyeOfNitc and FakeNitcBlogger, and from a neutral perspective.)

You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
- Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight

A famous quote from one of the best movies ever made. Batman eventually made the harsh decision of taking the responsibility of the murders so that the Joker didn’t win at the end (If you didn’t see The Dark Knight, believe me, it’s a crime and you need to be hunted down!). But most thought “Why did he have to take the blame?” This might be due to the Bollywood mentality that is lodged in our minds right from childhood, that is, many of us can’t stand an unhappy ending for our hero. “He went through all this sh*t, for this?” But I got my answer in scope of a few months experiencing college life…strangely, college does teach you life lessons.
Politics is a scary word. It always comes down to mud-slinging and lobbying. There’s no room for ethics and truth to make any real impact. And social relations turn into political gimmicks when the big ‘equivalent of happiness’ comes into play – money.

“Money, it’s a crime.
Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie.
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today.
But if you ask for a raise it’s no surprise that they’re
Giving none away.”

- Pink Floyd

And with money comes power. That’s the basics. Now getting into the real picture –
When you enter college as a first year, all you wanna do is make lots of friends, make yourself prominent in friend circles. You want the circle to become huge, show off your unity to the senior years, thinking that it would stun them or provoke them from ragging you. You give your group a name, print it on t-shirts, store loads of group photos on your comps…terming them as the best moments of your lives. The intention is good; you want the whole year to be united and decisions to be unanimous, in fact, that’s the way how things should be. But does this ideology survive for long?

Think about it. However strong your bonds are with others, you are all different people. Some might be the ones who are really talented and work or don’t work their asses off, others are those who have no particular talent but execute well, some play second fiddle to these people, and then there are many who don’t care and just wanna have fun.

So imagine a situation where a decision is to be made. Different people voice their opinions- it is inevitable that the final decision made is flawed, but the right opinion is in one of the individuals’ minds and he isn’t supported. Chances are so unlikely that he’s gonna walk off citing that people didn’t heed his advice. He will force himself to believe that that’s best for the group and keep mum. For the simple reason he doesn’t want to be left out.

Then when a group is huge, there are gonna be individuals who feel they don’t belong to or play any role in the group’s decision-making process and gradually break-off. They may choose to silently work on their own. Bottom-line – it’s tough to include everyone satisfactorily.
Now comes the case of positions of power and handling money matters. The following sequence of events occur –
1) You choose your leaders and decide among your group who is worthy of the highest posts.
2) But there are people outside the group who seem to be worthy too, but they don’t have an enormous following as your leader. But you find difficulty accepting him just because he’s not a part of your group. Your leader will obviously want the power so dearly (Come on, who doesn’t want the authority of being answerable to no one and money under your control?), that he has to cook up games to run him down.
3) Then starts the saga of mass masquerading – acquaintances forcibly turned to ‘conditional’ friends – I do this favour for you, so you do this for me.
4) Things turn worse, your following starts taking credit for events run in college which couldn’t have been run without others’ help.
5) Then to prove yourselves, you end up sidelining the people who had worked all the while and ‘teach them a lesson’ not to mess with you.
6) Finally, there is a rift, and the election.
7) The ambitious ones will win, while the ethical ones end up cribbing as to why they had wasted their time, which could have been judiciously spent learning a word or two and improving grades.
8) They will, sooner or later, be paid for trying to do anything defaming your group.

Let me paint an even bigger picture. Let those late-realizers who think that something can be done using truth as a weapon and basically vying for lost dignity before they leave college – be the heroes. Let’s assume a Bollywood ending to our story, and due to some impossible magic, the heroes with their honesty win. Now, it is their duty to ensure that such ‘groupism’ doesn’t haunt the college anymore. So they have to discourage the already existing ones in the junior years. What has to happen? Do you possibly think an overnight advice is going to break up their ideology? The heroes too will have to play games, break-up and sideline the junior group…wait, aren’t these the traits of the villain too? How different are the current heroes from the past villains?

Remember Harvey Dent’s quote. If the ethical people lost (die a hero), their idea will remain. An idea won’t die, and will ultimately inspire someone in the later years to stand up to the atrocities in their respective year. But is there a solution to all of this? Try as hard as you can, involve your IITian friends too, but trust me, you would be imagining a perfect world where individuals will get voted with full justice and these individuals too, use their power and money judiciously. If individuals stand for an election, there will be smaller groups supporting them. And to win, there will be campaigning, and politics creeps back into the scenario. Only grace being that it is on a much smaller scale comparatively. Once whosoever is in power, there might be dissatisfaction for others, and rumours, true or false, will circulate.

What do you gain from all of this? Unless you want a post, nothing. Just the ephemeral feeling that your group won, or distraught after losing everything. Logically, it’s best not to be involved in groups. Make some trustworthy friends whom you can bank upon after college life. But this ideology will wither once you want to do something for your college. So concentrate on your academics (That will require some serious concentration! How are you gonna sit simply when people beside you are working, and enjoying getting credited with success of events?). But if you can’t stand up to a small problem in college, how are you gonna face dirtier setbacks in life?

Committees should be headed by those who have worked dearly for it in their junior years and know how things are run and have the capability to take wise decisions. If this is the case, then whosoever is in power is of no concern, that is, he shouldn’t be the one taking decisions and showing favouritism – it’s those who are currently running the show. That will curb most of the problems, at the least. That too is a happy ending. Frankly, Bollywood = real life is an equation that is solved only in ‘Slumdog Millionaire’!