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THE MICE THEORY
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Too Much Hostelism?

Two months back, in Novemeber we had a STIC Dinner at Kumaon. STIC stands for Student Teacher Interaction, a night cleverly organised weeks before the Majors where students invite their Favourite(read fail-grading) Professors, serve them with tasty food and butter them up with their conversations. Anyways, what I want to discuss here is the talk our Hostel Seniors were having with Prof. Shashi Mathur (Dean of Students Affairs). He believed that a lot of hostelism had seeped into the walls of IITD, giving rise to Anti-Cheering, Unhealthy Competitions and blah blah, making the integrity of the Institute weak somewhere, somehow. He casually pointed out that the solution for that could be rotation of hostel for the students every year, or having Inter-Departmental Competitions rather than Inter-Hostel. Being a fresher I could not understand the magnitude of the problem at that time, I just knew how the Jwala Hostel were mimicked from their original Insti-Champs Tag(or ICs, as they used to say) to Insti-Ch**tiyas. Today everyone knows the obvious meaning of IC being the latter one.
It was only recently that I tasted the big scale hostelism, the hostelism the Dean was talking about. On Sunday(the 18th) Night, when the Inter-Hostel Group Dance Competition was going on in the Seminar Hall, anything someone could hear in the gap between two performances was students shouting and cheering for their hostel. What any hostel, say 'X', was doing was to produce the noise of "Jai X" in the highest decibals of sound possible.
The Kumaon one goes like this-
Door gagan me ek taara,
Kitna sundar kitna pyara.
Maa mujhe wo tara dede,
Mujhko mera pyala dede.
Jai Kumaon! Jai Kumaon!
All that seemed to be fine until the end of the event when I had my first encounter with Anti-Cheering at IIT Delhi. When the results were announced, it had become clear that Kumaon would be lifting the 'Dance&Dramatics Winners Trophy' with that 2nd-position in the Group-Dance. There were a couple of hostels fixating their eyes on us while producing their "respective hostel noise" , as if trying to tell us, "You won the DnD Trophy, but the RCA(Recreational & Creative Activities Trophy) is ours". And what Kumaon was doing in return was another rhyme leaded by Ishan-
" Doodh Mangoge to Kheer Denge, RCA mangoge to cheer denge! "
Ishan Mittal, a Kumaon 4th yearite, is an alumni of the same school from which I passed out(just for the General-Knowledge part). I can undoubtedly say that this guy has got the maximum enthu (our short form for enthusiasm) for Kumaon. He's the one who grumbles at the freshers during his Mess-Meeting 'scolda-thons', who do not participate in events for Kumaon, do not show enthu for Kumoan, do not help fellow Kumaon-ites for their events. He wants to see Kumaon winning each of the trophies awarded at every and any years' BHM(Board of Hostel Management) Night.
Another Ishan 'scolda-thon' dialogue,
"Jab BHM night parr koi aur hostel RCA uthakar le jaa raha hoga naa, Aur jab ankho mei aansu aate huye bhi Jai Kumaon bolne mei jo g**d phategi, tab pata chalega"
(Just got an idea, next post would be an archive of Ishan Scoldathon Dialogues)
Anyways, all that Anti-Cheering stuff was fun, atleast it was not as severe, serious and physical as the movie "Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar".
But the next day was really disappointing. It was the Eastern Music Night on Monday(the 19th). Every hostel performance was cheered by claps rhythmed with beats of the song they played. But the set of people enjoying a particular performance happened to be unique for every hostel. Every student was clapping for his hostel even if they sang shit and during any other hostel's performance, kept quite, showed no interest, even if they played awesome. That was not a pleasing sight for any music loving eyes or maybe any unbiased non-IITDian eyes. No one cared to freely enjoy and appreciate talent just for the fear of the judges getting impressed with a rival hostel's "show stopper" performance.
There are top colleges like BITS Pilani and IIT Bombay which probably don't face this problem of hostelism, but we do. I don't know if it is really a big problem, I don't know if it is harming us , I don't know if we have a solution. Maybe its all positive and nothing negative, I dont know. But I know that I felt something weirdly bad that night.