Thank God for TNB

Students in parts of Bihar are demanding the right to cheat. In Sasaram today, they ransacked a college and set on fire government property and fought pitched battles with the police, who were forced to open fire. One person died.

Well, the students have been demanding what they feel is rightfully theirs. The generation, appearing for the secondary and intermediate exams, has grown up in a state where cheating in exams was elevated to the status of a fundamental right. That’s the difference Laloo Prasad Yadav brought into Bihar.

I have written quite a few exams in Bihar both before Laloo and in his initial days, when the cheating-is-right was a small disease affecting pockets of the state but not all of it.

I knew that many guys in those pockets would score more than I would. But I had to work hard to do well because I was in a better college with a tradition.

All of us students at T.N.B. College, Bhagalpur, used to think we were deprived of a right, students of some colleges in the city could exercise. In smaller towns and rural areas, the freedom was complete.

It was much later that we TNB guys realised we weren’t the deprived ones. The truth was that the so-called rightful privileged ones were not so privileged. They were deprived of education, classes and facilities.

I saw some of those colleges later. Some were housed in buildings smaller than the political science wing at TNB. Most didn’t have lawns the size of 10 football fields, the ones we were used to.

Their labs and teachers were both unequipped. Most of them had become teachers in private colleges because they were unemployed even after getting their masters degree, if not good-for-nothing. The colleges were regularised.
They started getting salary. Life became easy.

It was easier to let the pupil copy for one week every year than teach them for 51 weeks. Most didn’t have any commitment to the profession, because most didn’t want to become a teacher. The colleges didn’t have a reputation to live up to.

Laloo, the new messiah of social justice, brought about a great new social leveller. He couldn’t give everyone education. But every one had a degree. Thank God, not all of them are equal. Bihar still has colleges like TNB and you can’t count them on fingers.