SUJI: A life that was MNR

A Tryst with Tagore

I often wondered why the freshers’ hostel was called Tagore. One conclusion that I drew was that just as the great man had so many varied talents, so were those of the first year inmates – the freshers which ranged from public speaking to cartooning to palmistry to dramatics and so on. But that wasn’t the real reason – all the hostels were named after freedom fighters – Tandon, Malviya, Patel and Tilak. After a few months, I realized that even the roads and some parts of the city were named in a similar fashion.

Room No: 69 The number was special since it read the same upside down. My roomies were – Hirendra Rathore from Agra, Praveen Narayan Dongre from Nagpur and Ajay Shukla from Gujarat. Truly, we had almost the representation of the whole of India in our room. And that itself, the feeling of integration, made all the difference. But hardly did I know that the greatest disintegrating factor was an inherent part of the REC – the factor of groupism. The ‘kahan se hai tu’ became a real question for me – ‘kahan se hoon main?”