Hello. Made it ? Decided to Come ? Right. Welcome.
Or Not.
Newbie, THIS is why you should RUN for your life in the other direction :
1) Heard about places in the middle of nowhere ?
Well, get to the middle of nowhere, then take a left, and go down a 2.8 km stretch. That’s Nalsar. We’re 25 DAMN KM from Hyderabad.
See, this isn’t really Nalsar, Hyderabad . It’s Nalsar, the hamlet of Shameerpet.
2) The chief attraction within a 5 kilometre radius is a deer park. The chief attraction within a 10 kilometre radius is a café that smells of a curious mixture of phenol and animal fat, mixed with cheap perfume. Eau di Toilet, really.
3) The teachers. Many of them are often mediocre. When they’re not being terrible, that is. Within the walls of the NALSAR academic block, we’ve been accosted with lecturers who felt that teaching the law involved reading out the bare act as slowly as possible and nothing much more; where the idea of “application based questions” has often been re-imagined as testing the ability to guess what case the set of naggingly familiar facts belongs to; and where a constructive academic review was met with anger and sarcasm as opposed to introspection.
The pursuit of knowledge never was such a struggle.
4) Us. We’re often snotty, arrogant and phlegmatic.
5) 5) The Curfew timings : 7 Pm. ‘nuff said.
… And this is why you’d be an idiot if you do :
1) 1) So, we’re far away from the noise of the city. Think about it - haven’t you had enough constant , unceasing exposure to that most of your life ? Now this kind of remoteness - it forces you to interact with big chunks of the 400 –odd people around you. Even more importantly – it gives you chances, space, moments - to know yourself better. This is often rewarding … the best times I’ve had in law school weren’t the ones when I was out partying out in the city. It’s always been the quieter moments, the little rooftop conversations in the dead of the night, the daily mess coffee gathering at 4.30, or the lakeside strolls at 6 pm.
2) 2) Hey, I like deer. You’ll probably like them too. Plus, you get to feed the deer at the park ! Plus, this park is apparently one of the the top 10 biodiversity parks in India, atleast according to some winter 2008 issue of Jet Airways’ inflight magazine. It also has a curious log cabin with a tree trunk growing through a hole in a bed. Now that story I’d like to know.
And the café ? Well it does have an open air section, so the only time you really have to experience the stomach-turning aroma is when you go inside to haggle about the bill. Haggling bills with establishments in the vicinity of Shameerpet appears to be a stolid NALSAR tradition.
3) The teachers. I walked into law school looking at the law as nothing more than an instrumentality, a ladder, to get me those big bucks at a firm. I walk out with a genuine sense of fascination for the law, about its myriad possibilities, about its potential to destroy, and to rebuild. I attribute this transformation almost completely to 2 professors on campus, who, through a mixture of intense discussions - both within the classroom and outside, through challenging, pushing and prodding me, made me re-evaluate everything I thought I knew.
The exhilaration of your brain whizzing to make connections , even as you start recalling the verbose valentines to the law you’d read before joining law school and begin seeing some glimmer of truth in them ?
Well, we have classes where you get to experience that.
4) Us. Firstly, every law student worth his salt is snotty, arrogant and phlegmatic. But there’s a more important secondly. See, years of being far from the madding crowd and trapped together has caused us all to go politely, but very very thoroughly, insane. This makes for an often entertaining on-campus experience, combining influences from the best of absurdist theatre with more popular culture to interesting effect. This is the campus where a hostel curfew protest was led with a group of blues guitarists jamming outside the hostel gates at the “forbidden hour”. Otherwise sane young adults have chased each other with mops around the library the night before an exam. Within the walls of this esteemed legal institution I have witnessed a play featuring what I believe were talking genitalia arguing about why they weren’t spoken about more prolifically.
Atleast I think that’s what it was about.
5) Okay, the curfew timings are just WRONG.
There are other things of course. There is the constant uphill battle in obtaining a semblance of lucid reasoning/engagement with the administration. There are the mushrooming academic groups, that start strong, flare out, then are revived with even more resolve. There are the spur-of-the-moment on-campus dance parties. There is the Drama Club. There was a movie club - maybe you can come and revive it ?
Whatever, newbie. This is going to be a wild ride, but it never gets boring.
Except, well, the bit where you have to study the CPC. Not fun.
P.S. thanks to legalpoet for giving me the idea by doing a similar post on NLU. Cheers !
http://danspeak.blogspot.com/