A MODEL – THE CAMPUS

As we sauntered along the promenades of the Indian Botanical Garden, we were witness to the scimitar sail of a boat slicing a bleeding sunset sky in one of its quotidian voyages beyond the embouchure. Not long after that first experience of a pristine beauty, it was our turn to embark on a peregrination beyond the campus we so dearly longed for. Reasonably eventful, if not a perfect odyssey, as that journey was destined to be, it demanded that we frequently fall back on acquired panache and virtuosity infused into us at the campus. Beyond the microcosm of our campus, the ubiquitous ‘survival of the fittest’ propelled us to prove our mettle irrespective of the ambience of the arena we landed up in and to carve a niche for ourselves therein. We did so successfully, very often with diligence enduring much travails and sometimes with élan, as we forged ahead into new frontiers in our quest for success.
Eventually we had to be either dashing entrepreneurs with trenchant ilk of business development or recognized erudite professors in reputed institutions or impeccable engineers or administrators successful in administering implementations of management principles of highest orders. As I script these words sitting on my escritoire, I sincerely realize that it is simply iniquitous to deny the fact that our discrete experiences at the campus had subliminal influences in transforming ourselves to ‘characters’ as articulated above.
The unbridled uhuru provided to us in the campus, be at official debating forums or at the dining table of our hostels or at the college canteen, had enabled metamorphosis of potential individuals of yesteryears into present day ‘characters’ powering dreams and latent potentials of budding engineers of tomorrow. Everything, the succinct ratiocination, boisterous recriminations against quixotic schemes and nebulous ideas, blistering op-ed assaults against occasional frivolity and grotesqueness etc. were sheer acts that facilitated deliquescing positive facets of others’ characters into one’s own. These supplemented by the fecundity of the oxymoronic phrases that were integral to the patois of the campus, the emotions they imparted (albeit seemed maudlin sometimes) have had their discrete contributions in making the campus a virtual maquette (model). All that was needed from us was to calibrate the model for use in the outer vast world beyond the campus.
Much more than a frontline platform for spreading a techno-lineage, the BENGAL ENGINEERING COLLEGE (popularly known as the SHIBPUR college) continues to be an esteemed and a loved place.