Passing out

I just wrote an edit about the college admissions mess that is on in Maharashtra right now. Since there are so many students, so many examination systems and so few colleges that are reputed and desirable, not everyone gets what they want, few actually manage to steer into the ‘stream’, as it is called, that they deserve to be in. What is especially frightening for someone like me, who was never really part of the great and glorious ‘system’, except in parts – many bad, like the egg the curate should never have eaten – is that young people these days are doing better and better, as their increasingly higher marks show off, but they still seem to be not good enough. I wonder, does this pressure drive them into vocational training that they do not fit into, thereby creating so many sub-standard working adults, or does it drive them off the terrace, literally, pushing them into a suicidal situation that, often, there is no retreat from?

All that apart, school and college were fairly traumatic for me – in those aforementioned ‘parts’ – but never about the unending striving for something that was so tantalisingly out of reach. I did manage to do okay, graduated without too much strain - though there was plenty of stress for me and my family – and am now busy with a career that was serendipitous but just what I should have aimed for, more or less. But the favourite time of each phase in my education life was the leaving of it (if I am not wrong, somebody far more famous and wise said something like that long before I wrote it here!). I have never understood why people call it ‘passing out’, unless they are talking about the aftermath of keg parties and prom-night binges that are so common in the US and now even in India, but graduation is better known thusly in this country.

Perhaps my first and favourite graduation memory is when I was done with school in Switzerland. It was a very formal occasion and we all had to dress up to the nineteens for it. And after the ceremony was the graduation ball, on a boat in the middle of the lake – that was maybe the first all-night party I went to and, frankly, one of the most boring, since most people were either getting drunk, making out in various dark corners or just fast asleep at the tables in the lower deck because they were exhausted after a grinding few weeks of final exams.

The ceremony itself was formal, with all of us waiting in line to go up on stage, shake the principal’s hand and get a tiny roll of diploma. My parents were there and met all my friends and teachers, and I felt terribly adult in a gorgeous silk sari and heels. I walked with my classmates, all of unusually solemn and nervous, to the stage and was told, as I was given my little roll of parchment, that I looked like an ‘Indian princess’, which almost made me fall off my sandals and down the stairs. Soon after, my parents took me and my friend home to change for the ball and we giggled madly about who was wearing what that was not quite right. Typically schoolgirl stuff, but perfect for that time and place.

A few years later I was all set to graduate again, this time from college after an incredibly tumultuous and occasionally traumatic time through a graduate school course. I wandered with a friend through the college campus wondering where we would go next, both of us more formally dressed that we had ever seen each other. He wore formal trousers and a starched white shirt; I was in white and silver cotton, a modern version of the traditional salwar kameez. And we attracted more attention than we usually did, with parents of our various classmates and people we had never seen before stopping us and telling us how fabulously exotic we looked. There was a sadness in the pleasure – we had both made good friends during the time we had spent in the department and would miss not only all of them, but even the teachers, the classrooms, the window seat that I did most of my homework on, the students we had taught, the times we had fought and made up about the way a sentence was constructed…and, of course each other.

‘Passing out’ was as much fun as going into college. The kids who are trying to do both within the chaos that is the Indian system need to find out about this wonderful concept.