Honking cars, revved-up bikes and other vehicles had come to a screeching halt. It was a busy day, the kind where people, stuck in the rush hour traffic, wouldn’t stop long enough to sneeze. But that day, commuters had no option but to stay put in their vehicles without budging an inch. Several students had staged a protest outside the Police Commissioner’s office, in Chennai. Their faces were covered to mask their identities as they were expressing dissent against a college management that they were sure would victimise them for protesting. After all, the protestors thought, if the establishment could restrict them on the basis of dress codes or penalise them for talking to members of the opposite sex, staging a protest would undoubtedly elicit punishment at a whole new level. What started off as a protest on social media, spilled over to the Commissioner’s office, and, eventually, onto the roads outside a university in Guindy.
“It is no college, but a money-making scam. They impose fines for everything — from unshaven beards, forgotten ID cards, to the clothes we wear and the people we speak to.”
“If I miss an exam because my father is unwell, they don’t care. I was asked by the management to bring my ailing father to reason out why I hadn’t turned up for the exam.”
“Moral policing is all they know. The college earns Rs.20,000 a day, just through the fines they extract from us.”
The cathartic outpouring comes from students who have been given the gift of education while being denied some of their most basic rights. They’ve missed the forest for the trees. And by force, not choice.
Elsewhere, in another college on Old Mahabalipuram Road, far away from the Commissioner’s office, there are 20-something girls and boys, almost men and women, if you will, waiting for their buses to arrive. The girls talk to girls, and the boys, to boys. No attempt is made to talk to one another. Ramesh, a 20-year-old, chances a glance at a girl from the group in front, a hint of a smile on his face which disappears almost immediately, as a teacher strides past, a stern expression on his face. The buses arrive and the groups board the bus — the girls first, and later, the boys. Again, the rows on the right are occupied by the girls, while those on the left, by the boys. “That’s how it is, in engineering colleges here,” says Ramesh. “If we talk to girls, we will be pulled up.”
Over the years, colleges have posed innumerable restrictions on students — some, seemingly harmless such as banning the use of phones on campus, to more ludicrous ones where girls are not allowed jeans or leggings. The unanimous explanation from these academic institutions, when questioned about their restrictive policies, is that they are introduced to improve academic performance. The most common argument that institutions present is that “students need to remember what they are here for.”
“What connection do leggings have with the marks we score?” chimes in Reshma, an indignant third-year engineering student in the city. “And, how does it affect our performance if a senior guides us? Things do not change just because we are helped by members of the opposite sex.”
Students across different engineering colleges divulge that the atmosphere in many campuses is stifling, and worse, mortifying. “I was talking to a girl in my class regarding college culturals,” recounts Bala, a former student of Jeppiaar Engineering College. “A professor saw us in conversation and started berating us. Our ID cards were seized and we had to pay a fine. What’s more, we were questioned about our morals and upbringing. What right do they have to heap such insults on us? Why run a co-ed college if we are not allowed to talk to girls?”
Not only dress-codes and male-female interactions, students have to endure a host of penalties when they forget their ID cards, leave the campus without a letter or fax from parents, miss classes, among others. There are constraints on what kind of extra-curricular activities one can participate in, using the excuse of attendance requirement, even if conducted by the colleges. Such practices by an increasingly paternalistic system backfire. Even if there is a chance improvement in academics, there is a decline in the zeal for participating in various activities, mounting frustration and depression among students, and a widening rift between students and the administration.
“The repercussions of being in such an environment cannot be seen until much later,” explains Janane Sethunarayanan, a former student of St. Joseph’s College of Engineering. “Boys for instance, who have had minimum and monitored interaction with girls, will not be able to tolerate working under women. Girls face problems of a different nature. Lack of interaction may lead them to misconstrue a harmless handshake or compliments from a male colleague, as advances.”
The upshot of it all is that some of these rules have an adverse effect on the individuals whose future the colleges claim, they are trying to shape. While students pass out of these institutions with reasonably good scores, communication at work requires a herculean effort. After being within the confines of an atmosphere which has forbidden interaction with the opposite sex, individuals find the conflicting lack of exposure coupled with the need to interact, daunting.
Dr. Mangala, Consultant Psychiatrist, Schizophrenia Research Foundation (SCARF), explains that the problems arise as there is a stigma attached to boy-girl interactions, right from school. “There are major restrictions in some schools and girls are not allowed to talk to boys; there is an invisible wall between them. This extends to college, and any kind of conversation between both sexes is deemed as something that ought to be kept under wraps. Consequently, innocent banter between both sexes takes on a veil of secrecy, for fear of being rebuked. Students tend to converse in secret because they know people do not approve of it. They will learn to co-exist only when interactions between them are not speckled with the preoccupation of gender.”
Students have chastised the archaic rules forced on them by a management which promises to mould potential engineers for future challenges, which raises the inevitable question — how do colleges expect to prepare students for the summons of the world, when under the facade of discipline, they clamp down on their most basic rights?
