Two different pieces of news sometimes merge and send you down memory lane. On one hand there are reports about the London Olympics having a public art project with the loser and the loss as the focus in a success-obsessed world. (“A loser’s spirit is not as vulgar as the killer instinct”, The Times of India, July 25, 2012). And on the other, completing the month long ritual of “educational reporting”, even Non-Delhi papers have reports and photographs of freshers joining different colleges of Delhi University (as if university education in India doesn’t extend beyond DU).

Both these reports somehow take me back to the late Nineties, when “killer instinct” (or rather the lack of it) was the overused phrase in the media narrative on the Indian sports scene, and thousands of educational migrants from Bihar and UP were  academically outshining (and in many cases, even outnumbering) Delhites in Central Universities like DU and Jawaharlal Nehru University. They continue to do so, some without doing away with their rooted sense of identity with their home state, while some are “converts”, who seek the “happening citizenship” of the coffee shop circuit and wardrobe makeover of the metro-wannabe (the DU hostel lingo for the latter is “BBC”, i.e. Bihari Ban Gaya CAT- Casual American Teenager).

But, the migrant students’ life in DU can usually be far less dramatic and far more engaged with the non-university world of competitive examinations than Siddharth Chowdhury would have you believe in his work, Day Scholar (if you could complete reading his disastrous Bong bhadralok foray into the complex layers of Bihari presence in Delhi’s campuses).

So how does the London Olympic’s artistic antidote to George Orwell’s description of modern sporting culture as “war minus shooting” fit in the narrative of educational migrants in Delhi University? In some ways it does, and it fits in the tale of the coming of age of migrants in Delhi’s campuses. Sample this:

“Tetanus”, recalled my Bihari seniors in Delhi University, was the word used for them when some of them joined DU in the late Eighties and early Nineties. The word was some sort of a “quasi-racial backlash” (as Dr AN Das describes in his work The Republic of Bihar) unleashed by people who were elbowed out by Biharis from premier institutions of the capital, with their academic excellence. Tetanus was a derogatory reference to the “infection” that students from Bihar were supposed to carry because of the humble rusted steel trunks with which they boarded trains for New Delhi railway station. So if anyone says Delhi has been clean vis-à-vis Mumbai’s insular tirade against Biharis and UP’s bhaiyas, don’t buy the theory. Delhi has been equally culpable on this count, if not more.

It  would help to remember that responding to such heartburn among “Delhites” (for whatever that means) on being denied their “share” of seats in the capital’s coveted institutions, renowned educationist Professor Amrik Singh had famously observed: “Students from Bihar are in capital’s top institutions because of their brilliance, not because of anybody’s mercy”. And brilliance was what they were showing. Many seniors, who were target of derogatory comments, told me that the jibes somehow fuelled a “point proving urge”, and added to their not-so-instinctive “killer instinct”. They made their ways to the top of the Civil Services examination list, and it’s no wonder that a large number of IAS, IPS and IFS officers recruited in the last two decades are from Bihar (prior to Delhi University being the den of Civil Services aspirants, they were also joining Civil Services from IAS-churning traditional centres like Patna University). I have addressed some other aspects of this phenomenon in my other piece which can be accessed through the link:

http://www.newslaundry.com/2012/02/the-young-descendants/

In pre-university competitive tests for professional courses, the success of students from Bihar in admission tests for premier institutions like IITs has been well-documented in the press as well as in academic circles.

But here lies the trap. Careerist success and examination cracking “killer instinct” is one thing, but has the mechanics of that distanced the young Bihari minds from the original spirit of intellectual inquiry, observations of life, nature and universe and horizons of creativity? Are they willing to explore the treasures that lie beyond a careerist “loss”? And are they motivated to find the solitary space that has vistas of original challenges of the human quest for knowledge, creation and excellence? The slender presence of Bihar in fundamental research and defining creativity should worry the “achieving” society which young Biharis are getting trapped into. The untold tales of career “loss” can be more edifying for Bihar which has historically prided itself on original intellect than approval-seeking professional triumphs.

A different question, more akin to the question addressed by the art project in London Olympics, is what about the thousands who don’t make it to the list of successful candidates after devoting prime years of their youth to preparing for competitive examination? They are no martyrs, but in their loss also lies the ironies of life and tyranny of imposed hierarichal identity based on numerical absurdities. Amartya Sen poses the question in his work Identity and Violence and finds it weird that someone scoring 299 (hypothetically) could be punished with joblessness and someone scoring 300 could be rewarded with lifelong privileged living as a bureaucrat. This is quite similar to the agony of an athlete in the Olympics who goes unsung for being late by a fraction of a second. Somethings are best expressed by clichés, so the cliché goes: “Victory has thousand fathers, loss remains an orphan”.

But, humour may sometimes be cathartic for expressing the sense of loss for all the lost years of competitive examination candidates. Surely there are signs that a society that breeds such one-dimensional aspirations has also learnt to laugh at its obsessions. A popular satirical song on this addiction has the lines: Ashieye se BA kaike, bachchwa hamar competition deta, MA me leke admission, competition deta (A father of a struggling “examinee” is describing the credentials of his son to someone who has come with matrimonial inquiries: Having passed his BA exam way back in 1980, my child is appearing in competitive examinations, besides being enrolled in an MA course). Listen to Manoj Tiwary as he sings this Bhojpuri song which takes a hilarious dig at the government job-obsessed hostel students of marriageable age:

Success is the language of market societies, it breeds competitive individualism and places premium on the capitalist pecking order. Such language has no vocabulary for the qualitative, pristine and humanistic aspects of an experience called “effort”. In that sense, success is self-limiting in its vacuities and illusions. The use of this language in all professional, intellectual and even personal exachanges is as restrictive for sporting excellence as it is for exploring the immense potential with which a new batch of students from Bihar (not carrying the tetanus scar) would have had their first week at Delhi University. Their challenges lie in extending the frontiers of human knowledge and creativity, not in basking in the glory of socially-stamped achievements. And yes, this preaching is coming from a young man who in his younger days, started by taking a shot at the Civil Services examination, while being enrolled in MA. Result? Well you know.

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