A Beginners' Course in Humility

When we had joined here, one senior member of the faculty, and a senior officer in his own right, had mentioned – “Many of you might be wondering ‘how the hell did I get in here’. Wait for a few weeks, and you’ll be wondering ‘how the hell did they get in here’!” Well, the weeks have passed, and yet, at the core of one’s core, the original wonderment remains unchanged. If anything, one’s respect for one’s fellow sufferers has increased as the weeks have progressed.

To begin with, the Academy has had a big role to play in this ‘belittlement of the self’! The Course is like a never ending sequence of events which bring out and highlight all the obvious and subtle sets of qualities that one does not possess, bringing one to a fuller appreciation of the extent of one’s inabilities. Someday it is a trek – to make one realize one is rather inept at walking and climbing up and down pebbly slopes. The other day, it is a poetry recital – to drive home the point that one is totally ill equipped for penning beautiful verses. Then, they take you to climb up and rappel down the cliffs, or to row one’s raft over the rapids – to elucidate the how far does a human heart resemble a chicken’s. Finally, there are “cultural evenings”, that brings to light the fact that one is neither a singer, nor a dancer, nor an actor. Ah, nothing like this course to serve as a lesson in humility.

It’s not that the classrooms are any better than the fields. In the Law class, one shares the room with 2 ex-Judges and 1 Columbia Law grad! Some of the instructors get worried about speaking too much about Law in their presence, lest they provoke the wrath of Their Honours! When it comes to Economics, we have a handful of post graduates from the London School of Economics (well, that may have been a source of much mirth and derision for Sir Humphrey Appleby and Sir Bernard Woolley of Oxford, but for me, that is nothing less than the scriptural virgin birth!) One is surrounded by scores of IIT grads, who often mistake one for one of their ilk, and try to include one in their IIT-lingo talks, which can lead to much awkwardness. No, they are not being stupid, it’s just the fact that IIT-ians are so ubiquitous in this place. Then, in the language class, (and sometimes at a grubby roadside eatery on a late, unshaven Sunday morning), one gets a chance to sit adjacent to, and converse with, a qualified neurosurgeon from AIIMS. In the past one month, I’ve read an article that uses Mathematics and Economics (the subjects that I, never really understood and half understood, respectively) to do a humourous take on the existence of God. Then, I’ve read, and listened to Hindi poems dripping in all rasas – the veer ones match, and dare I say, even surpass Dinkar, while the haasya ones can put the Chaturvedis and Joshis to shame – don’t just take it on face value – just pick up and read a copy of the Academy news letter.   Enough to set one wondering what the hell has one been doing all one’s life!

Height has always been a touchy issue for most people – and I, at 5’ 8” and a half (a very vital half), had always considered myself to be adequately blessed. That was till I joined in here. From the beginning of this course I had an awkward feeling of being looked down upon. To my ultimate horror, I realised, last week, the extent of this declination. For some (more) unnatural (than before) set of calisthenics in the morning, we were asked to line up height wise. In a group of 16, there were 3 ladies, then a guy, and then there was me! (The unfortunate guy was my roomie, and we joked about it – we joke about a lot of our life here, which itself is beginning to look like a long, uninspiring joke) Put in probabilistic terms, 68 % of the people here, and 84 % of the male people here, are taller than one. It looks like a straight lift from Geri Halliwell’s “It’s raining men” – “..tall, blonde, dark and mean; rough and tough and strong and lean…” That’s enough to put one properly in one’s place, as the runt of the lot.

If the menfolk have been hostile by being too ‘Adonistic’, the womenfolk have contributed in equal measure. In my last article, I had written about the feisty ladies who climbed the Dharwadhar with us. Then, there was one who climbed a 25 metre vertical cliff, with bare hands, in 3 minutes flat! One could hardly believe one’s eyes, but then, the soul was rather familiar with this feeling! There are some who can jog around the town and back in an hour, and still appear shower fresh, while one takes on an appearance of someone mauled by a bear in walking half the distance. And then, there are some, who, when armed with a tennis racquet or a basketball, can really humiliate one in those ‘compulsory’ games classes!

All this sets one to wonder – how does one go about one’s business in this stomping grounds of Goliaths, where one is subjected, almost daily, to what has been described by Douglas Adams as the most torturous punishment in the Universe – the Total Perspective Vortex (for the uninitiated, it is a device, which ”… compares the incredibly small size of the person to the enormous size of the universe. It shows him the size of the "entire unimaginable infinity of creation" along with a tiny little marker that says, "You are here." ”). Well, simply by following the path shown by none other than Adams himself – the way Zaphod Beeblebrox survived the TPV (again, for the uninitiated, “…..The reason for Zaphod Beeblebrox’s survival was actually quite simple; he had a large ego. In fact, his ego was so large it was the size of the universe. He actually thought he was the most important person in the universe. As a result, he didn’t see himself as being insignificant in comparison to the gigantic universe. The immense size of the universe didn’t overwhelm him or make him feel hopelessly lost…”) And so, we say, that despite the chasms deep and wide, between them all and one, chasms in ability, chasms in accomplishments, may be even chasms in aptitude, one is here, rubbing one’s shoulders with them (we are not going into the details of whether one’s shoulders rub against their shoulders or their knees!), and there in lies the key to eking out a survival.