A Real Person
By R.
Hey there.
It’s me.
I am a person. A real person.
I was a doe-eyed seventeen year old, crawling up out of my walls when I had the misfortune of meeting another person. An artificial person, who for all intents and purposes decided to register itself as Christ. It told me of its motto, service and excellence. At the time, it sounded to me like the selling point for car lubricants. As years passed by, I learned more of my intended place in the world, that of a cog in its machinery, and then its motto started making so much more sense to me.
From the naïveté of rose coloured lenses, I imagined my relationship with every other person to be that of love fluffs and moon cakes. Yet my soul itched and my skin burned with rashes. I looked in to see my spirit dying. I opened my eyes to see why. I heard the impassioned drone of its soulless oppressed teachers and breathed in its stifling air; each cubic centimetre regulated by the management. I couldn’t leave its four walls. I had not paid lakhs to get detained for attendance shortages.
Dog-tagged and fully clothed, I satisfied all its criteria. But still its battalion of guards never ceased to find something wrong with me. Don’t loiter near the entrance, don’t sit on the pavement, don’t stand here, don’t sit there, don’t sit that way, where the fuck do you expect me to go in this over populated world if not loiter in my own campus?
Fourth year, I was almost there, almost out of this hell hole. Just one more fee demand slip and I would be out. One more year, and there would be an end to running around with clearance certificates paying 5000 rupee fines for attendance shortages.
Why had this artificial person not registered itself as Bakasur? It would have befit its appetite for all the fines it collects from thousands of its students huddled close together on its campus. There is no space. No space in its parking lot that chains our bikes and fines us for leaving them overnight. No space in its coffers that charges us for our own placement brochure. No space in its heart that suspends us for two days for not attending the first day of the semester. There is no space. But then again there can be no space in just service and excellence. Every semester it makes me fill out faculty evaluations without which my hall ticket would be blocked. Here’s my institutional evaluation, in this relationship, I was the dominated. Instead of acknowledging me as a participant, a partner in this process for a national goal like education, it treated me like a recipient vessel of shit, blazered me in black and white for money minded corporations like itself. It never asked me if I wanted workbooks for wasting tree lives on redundant mindless copying. It never asked me if I wanted brand new dog tags in my final year for wasting plastic on me. It never asked me if I wanted CCTV camera coverage for my every activity and wasting footage on me. Christ treated me with mistrust, as an object under its control to be disciplined. All these five years I have never felt so loved. For your namesake at least treat your students with some love. Acknowledge me, damn it, as a partner in this process of education.
Bye now.
I was a person. A real person.
Did you love me? Well you should have, I was a real person.
