For those of you who thought this would be a meta article based on my Marquez-esque title, you’re wrong. I just had to show off a little to begin with. Although I adore the author, the only people I currently identify with are Ross and Rachel, as quarantine forces me into a slowly decaying potato state of mind (and body) in the middle of my 10^th rerun of this ghisa-pita hua show. For context, Ross is a cocky weirdo who likes Rachel, and Rachel, like a true Law School girl with no options, inevitably falls for him. Then they break up and make up and break up and make up and break up and make up (yes, I have put the exact number of times).

Why do I currently feel like them? Something is oddly familiar about the way they yell “We are SO over,” “We were on a break,” “I don’t need your stupid ship” and the like, only to fall in a limbo of uncertain feelings again and again. After all, I’ve had my own love-hate, on-off, toxic, full of incredible highs (hehe) and painful lows relationship over the last 5 years. This is not a romantic expose — I speak of Law School. And much like Rachel, only now that the ship has finally sailed, do I realise how much I will miss the stupid ship.

This ship has a lovely exterior, full of green and white and red, and it draws you into its fold immediately, like a beautiful green Venus fly-trap. The exterior of course conceals the air of anxiety, the unsteady ceiling of ridiculously high expectations, and the noxious environment of gossip and judgment that surrounds the entrant. Not to mention the institutionalised structural hierarchies and stigma that shape most interactions here. The bad times here are bad to say the least — but never fear because now we have not one but TWO counsellors (*orgasm*) to get us through it.

But perhaps my ship is more than just a well of cloying bitterness.

My ship is purple-orange skies that appear on cold evenings with the warmth of the laughter of your friends around you. My ship is evenings spent at Chetta doing the one leg dance (girls you get it) discussing anything from the CAA to the fond memories from a trip to Gokarna. My ship is the hungover smile on faces when they pass the newly muddy, brown Quad on mornings after a raging party. My ship is the genuine happiness on a beloved professor’s face when an entire batch surprises him one evening with a cake. My ship is the hours spent in exertion training batchmates to dance to Bollywood songs from 2 am the night before Eastern Dance.

My ship also has these tiny corners of light that I’ve often taken for granted. The pleasure (lol) of being woken up at 12 pm by loud, giggling ammas rather than your irate family screeching your name. The hours you spend talking about everything and nothing in your neighbour’s room, that you’ve made your own. The moment a professor exclaims in excitement because of a fierce but fulfilling academic fight in class. And most importantly – Atithi’s aloo parathas that can make any horrible day okay.

And CUT. Feel nostalgic? Yes, I do too. Now imagine someone throws you off this ship into the depths of the open sea with no warning. For context, watch Shah Rukh Khan throw Shilpa Shetty off a terrace in Baazigar in slow-mo (who wouldn’t?). The sea is cold, it is uncertain and you see no direction or relief. Yet you are expected to leave your beloved ship and home of several years, and begin to swim away from it. Except due to our friend Karuna, you can’t begin swimming away, and you’re immobilized in a position where your beloved ship is right there in front of you and you could have been on it, but it is now also beyond your reach.

People tell me this is adulting and this is the way of life, but as a good friend recently told me — yeh sab capitalist construct aka mohmaya hai. So, screw being mature about leaving Law School. We are going to whine and weep and prolong our stay when we come back for our luggage (lol sorry first years). Because this is our home.

This is not to say our experiences here are not shaped by who we are. As an upper caste cis-woman from a metropolitan city, I acknowledge my experiences are positive because of my privilege and background. Law School has a long way to go to make this ship a steady and joyful ride for more than just a few. Yet, Law School is also a people, and for them I am most grateful.

A Quirk article would be incomplete without gyaan, because Quirk articles are usually gyaan/ woke movie reviews/ cool rock sing-alongs no one gets, and we love it. My gyaan is simple – channel my batchmate Adit Munshi. Go back to college and take pictures of everything. Of trees and treadmills, of food and fungus, of Chetta coffee and class. Because believe us, it is heartbreaking to have no closure and a dream of OLTs that you thought you would get and memories you thought you would make. Treasure your time on this ship, because kal ho na ho, aur agar hoga bhi, toh bohot sucky hoga.

The fifth years shall continue our bingos and binge-watching, in the faint hopes that we can return to our beloved ship before that is lost to us forever. In the meantime, keep up the academic rigour and the scholastic incrementalism y’all!

[Image Description: The focus of the picture, in the centre, is the NLS library. Surrounding it are doodles of various things in Law School. There are mentions of all the food places in and around campus – Bistro, Chetta, Rohini, Hungry Hub, Juice Shop, Atithi and Gokul. Law School events are depicted – Spiritus (with a basketball hoop), SF (with a strawberry wearing headphones), Univ Week (with a banner), GCL (with a cricket bat and ball), Mooting (with a trophy) and Nego (with client and counsel placards). There are doodles of Dan, Dominos, Pride, a laptop running out of charge, a bookshelf, a hot beverage, weak wifi, a clock with the bell – various aspects of Law School. These are accompanied by mentions of Nagarbhavi skies, field scenes, Maggi and bun butter bhujia, tort v torts, “pedagogy” and “academic rigour” – all those little things that make Law School, Law School.]

P.S.: We still love you, Law School.

“Let’s chill at Chetta”. The phrase I’ve heard most repeated by first years after “Are you done with your projects?” At least we’ve got our priorities in order.  Now, Chetta opened about 2 weeks into our time here at Law School. We, first years, had already been so hyped up about how we were absolutely going to love it. So when it finally did open, I was underwhelmed. Ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out what the hype was really about?

To be fair, Chetta isn’t terrible – it’s a fairly decent shop with a variety of everything. But the ice cream tastes like… well, ice cream. The Maggi isn’t long enough to slurp, and they don’t have Piknik. So I’m here wondering, why is everyone in love with Aiswarya bakery?

If I were to think as a student of Economics I, I would think that it’s the theory of supply and demand. There is absolute scarcity of places that will supply you with an ice cream sandwich without the considerable effort of going outside campus, therefore we are all drawn to Chetta for our daily dose of happiness (read: junk food). Additionally, there’s the positive network externalities. Chetta is where the entirety of gossip from all over law school makes its way to, so to stay in the loop you have to be there. Also, at any given point in time if you’re suffering from boredom or anxiety, Chetta will have at least one person from the first year batch who also cares more about jam buns and lemon tea than the impeding project submissions. However, economics fails me in that whenever I go to Chetta – I seem to forget about my budget constraints and cease to be a rational consumer. A rational consumer would not be broke a month into law school. After all of this analysis, I should hope that I don’t have to give an economics repeat but it’s still very likely that it will happen.

Economics did a fairly decent job of helping me understanding the hype, but often, I still don’t understand the surge of love everyone in law school has for Chetta. However, some cold evenings eating hot cheese maggi, some nights singing “happy birthday” and stuffing our faces with cake, sitting in Yamuna past midnight when you hear people laughing and singing like they don’t have a care in the world … on such days, I get the hype. For most Law Schoolites, Chetta is more than just ‘Aiswarya bakery’. It’s the unending supply of chocolate when you just cannot stop crying. It’s lemon tea, music and friendship. It’s warm coffee and laughter. It’s comfort food; and God knows, we need all the comfort we can get, so far away from home.

For me personally, Chetta is a safe space less than 200m away from the library but miles away from the hassle of books and projects and first trimester in general. It’s a place I won’t find someone reading Carr, automatically sending me into panic mode (Disclaimer: don’t talk to me about projects at Chetta). It’s a place that gives me solace in knowing that midnight Maggis aren’t exclusive to home.

So, despite the PDA and wobbly benches, maybe, even if I did have abundance of choice, I would pick Chetta.

One of the side-effects of living away in a small, gated community isolated from urban civilization by dense patches of forest and bad roads is that it is easy to form toxic and often co-dependent attachments to others living within the same community. This is especially because a lot of us do not have access to home, hence we rely upon rank outsiders, about whose childhood and real background we have no information, to perform the functions expected of family members in situations of joy, grief, distress etc. This gets compounded by the fact that unlike the rest of the student community in the country, we have a degree course extending for five years. Hence while our school friends have already stepped over the precipice of adulthood and begun to form professional networks, we are forced to spend our entire late adolescence and early adulthood interacting with the same group of people prior to graduation. These relationships start out with bitching about History consults and Eco problems outside Chetta, graduate to the level of firming for Univs or drunkenly making out at a quad party, and finally concretize in the form of conspiring to indulge in committee politics and committing various disciplinary infractions together.

Now, since your insecure little first-year ass had zero discretion and sense of judgement in the matter of choosing people to hang out with, it is natural that you clung to the first person who showed interest in you and promised to fill the void that Mummy and Daddy had left behind. This could be the charming SBA office bearer who pointed out a talent you never knew existed, the charismatic senior who PI’d you mercilessly and then compensated you with a generous treat, the outgoing hostel-mate who was too cool and confident to take stress over pithy things like assignments on post-modernism, or the attractive batchmate/senior who was ready to hormonally disrupt all your PG-13 High School Musical notions of romance or some combination of all of the above. You were so in infatuation/adoration/worship with this person that you at multiple times sacrificed your academics/personal notions of comfort and discomfort/time and most importantly sleep, to fulfil their commands. You ran election campaigns, you cleaned up their vomit, you consoled them after their 999th breakup, you lost your virginity, you paraphrased their projects and cited their memos. You ignored allegations of manipulation, fraud, sexual harassment and other unchivalrous behaviour made against them-they were as spotless as Italian marble in your eyes.

However, all Gods must fall, and yours did too. It got harder and harder to ignore the whispers of wrongdoing made when people thought you were out of earshot, the accusations of being a ‘pet’ or a ‘plaything’, and the hours of emotional labour you invested in this person only to be rewarded with aloofness, sudden anger and/or unwarranted bouts of anger/loneliness. You were basically a Relationship Dishrag (‘RD’). You perform the same function that a broom and mop does in a house-you take all the dirt and grime, absorb all of the other person’s excesses and get nothing in return.

The RD’s greatest fear, and the reason they continue to subject themselves to hurtful treatment at the hands of somebody who has learnt very well how to exploit them is that ‘oh well, nobody else will love me the same.’ Everybody feels this in some deep corner of their heart, but the RD is particularly convinced that they are a flawed individual and if they have been mistreated it is on account of mistakes on their part and not due to any fault in their Lord and Master. (I can’t believe they picked out a Jhaadu like me! Oh my god! Such good fortune for a broom!) Every time the RD is hurt they tell themselves they must ‘Give another chance’ because after all, the said person was very helpful in getting them good grades/a coveted Convenorship/a speaker slot in a moot team or some random entry on their CV which they will never care about 10 years later, or simply because they feel the said person is the mythical Love of Their Life. This is compounded by the fact that lawyers rarely see the world in black-and-white terms; we are trained to give benefit of doubt to the accused. Besides, can a Pocha really complain?

The only advice I can give you is simply to leave. Yeah, of course, it’s not going to be easy. It is probable that each insecurity you have ever confided in the person will be weaponized and turned against you, your reputation may be maligned; your friends may say ‘I told you so’ and refuse to extend any sympathy and you may feel worse than you did while you were in the relationship. It’s okay. If you can’t handle detachment from somebody who is ultimately every bit as flawed and inconsequential as you are, possibly even more, then things are going to be very difficult when you leave law school if your Jhaadu Master allows you to graduate in one piece that is. You may experience regret over the fact that you wasted half a decade on this person, but your life has not ended, the same way the fact that you did not do anything particularly great in law school doesn’t mean you won’t achieve anything later. It’s okay if you leave this place without getting placed at a Tier-1 Law firm, or getting 20 gold medals, or becoming the SBA President, but if you leave with your personality and self-esteem reduced to that of a sodden piece of washing cloth, that will be your greatest loss.

Here’s a parable about inefficient government that I am sure all of you have heard – The government wants to employ three people to plant trees. One man to dig holes in the ground, the second to plant seeds in the holes, and the third to fill the hole up after the second is done. After a week of work, the second guy quits his job but the other two continue doing theirs – one man digs a hole and the other fills it up.

It’s easy to see how this plays out in college too. We see pathways being laid that go nowhere at all, buildings being built for god knows who, a lawn that was laid for people to drink on, security guards to stop people from drinking on the lawn, and a ‘book cafe’ (or whatever it is they’re calling it now) so that people study on the lawn instead of drinking on it. There is also fountain that was redone seven times in the five years that I have been in college, each time with new lights that get successively uglier, and fish that keep dying only to get replaced by ones that die faster. (Maybe we should just use the fountain to grow fish the way the gym grows rabbits and hand them over to the mess; we’ll have fresher fish that way.)  We have continued to adhere to hostel rules that prevent people from having sex but built a “learning centre” that is used for nothing but that. None of this is cheap – a mail from the erstwhile president of the Student Bar Association stated that the estimated cost of the cafe is thirteen lakh rupees. For everything else, we are left to estimate the costs ourselves.

For a while we were happy blaming the erstwhile estate officer for all the pointless construction; attributing it to an elaborate scheme to rob the college of its bank balance to line his own pockets. I do not believe any of that ever happened – he was one of the sweetest people that I have ever spoken to. However when I suggested this, I was told that I needed to have more proof if I wanted to disprove one of the most commonly accepted things in college. Thus, I added it to the list of things that I wanted to prove before I graduated – a list that includes proving that Rohini serves chicken and not crows, and proving that it’s ‘tort’ and not ‘torts’.

But today, I stand validated. Even after the estate officer has retired, the construction continues and we have got more funding than ever being pumped into redeveloping our campus. The sports committee is going to relay the basketball court (for the football league of course), the football ground is being modified to host parties, and the party lawn in front of the library is being turned into a study-space. All of this while we opened three new eateries because the mess wasn’t enough, bought two roti makers to cook more rotis, and then developed a disposal system because we were cooking too much food. We also made our campus completely disability-friendly by destroying two of the showers on the ground floor of Cauvery to build only one in their place – I do not understand how stench alleviates the plight of the handicapped. I have barely scratched the surface here – I haven’t even gotten to the online consumer mediation centre.

You will notice that several of the projects I mentioned here are student-driven and not a part of an elaborate money making scheme cooked up by the cunning college administration – the same cunning administration that hasn’t figured out how to use plagiarism software in five years (I wonder how much we’re paying for that). So, it is not the admin alone who is responsible for the cash that we’re blowing up; students are as culpable.

All of this may anger some of you. You may think that funds have simply been wasted away. You may wonder how many international trips we could have sponsored for our various “nego-champs” (*insert laugh emoji*) using this money. You may think that all of this has been pointless. But I beg to differ and I think there is a larger point to all of it.

Building things gives us something to do. We are driven to do all of this by the same instinct that makes us begin drinking in the evening, getting even more drunk at night, waking up in the morning with a hangover, spending the afternoon getting rid of the hangover, and begin drinking in the evening once again. Razing things down and building them up all over again gives purpose and meaning to our lives. It gives us something to talk about through the day and most importantly, it gives us the satisfaction that we have done something with our time on earth.  So the next time you think about mocking the MGNREGA for digging holes and filling them up, take a moment to wonder if it’s so preposterous after all.

“She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl”.

The words of Gillian Flynn often disturbed me. Maybe because it was the most blunt, honest characterization of millions of women, echoed by a psychotic yet genius woman (watch Gone Girl). Primarily because to my absolute horror, it was like a checklist I had ticked several points off for a couple of years after coming to NLS.

It’s difficult to clarify these things in your head. To my mind, I had always been a feminist. There was no question that I was not okay with sandwich jokes, but maybe I didn’t have to make a big deal out of it every time and give everyone “BT”. Maybe it was fine for me to simply give a small smile, but no encouragement. After all, these were my friends and I knew they weren’t sexist. What’s the harm?

The harm is what the Cool Girl does to you, internally and outwardly. Outwardly, you take convenient stances when it comes to your friends. You emphasize on context and shift focus from the issue to technicalities. Which is the problem in the way that so many of us reacted to the Vedica controversy last year – we caught up on the technicalities on how they had gone wrong, ignoring the subtle but important point that AoW tried to make. The Cool Girl unquestionably takes away from the fight that needs to be fought.

But the internal cost of being a Cool Girl at NLS is so much more. It is constantly second guessing yourself, and how interesting you are. It’s telling yourself that you must adopt the loud Delhi boy humour, as opposed to the quiet sardonic humour you possess right now. It is nudging yourself into situations and interests and activities that are not you, but they’re the understanding of cool.

It is circumventing your feelings and wishes in any relationship, tailoring your interests to the boy-man so that he likes you and enjoys spending time with you – after all, he has to if you’re one of the boys right? His friends MUST think you’re cool, never mind the personal discomfort you’re in by stifling your opinion and reactions. Creating a scene at Chetta, confronting your boyfriend and then becoming the talk of the entire college? Nah, the Cool Girl is a secure, hot woman, who quietly drinks her beer.

So should we stop drinking beer and devouring pizzas and wearing the clothes we think we like? I think it would be trivializing the issue to say that these traits should all be abandoned with immediate gusto. Mainly because they shouldn’t be allowed to be “masculine traits” to begin with. I, along with dozens of women I know, love beer and burping. That’s not something women should be apologizing for.

But then how does one even begin to break out of this trend?

I started by speaking. And speaking unashamedly. Phrases I often found myself adopting before were “I don’t entirely agree with you, but you are entitled to your opinion” or “I don’t think the way to change people’s minds is to shame them”. The latter I’ve found is the key to entrenching sexism in law school. And it’s a statement that every Cool Girl makes, because remember, you cannot be angry — you must smile in a chagrined manner. You will be congratulated for being rational and reasonable and calm. God forbid that you nag or boss or scold or do anything that isn’t chill.

Which brings me to “CHILL”. The eternal comeback given to every woman in law school who raises her voice, especially on matters of equality, but even on anything at all. If you are conscientious about your work, if you don’t want to spend your night lazing with contraband on the field, if you just don’t get Rick and Morty, if you don’t grin at pussy or sandwich jokes – congratulations, you’re no longer chill.  This isn’t to say that I have a problem with the women who choose to engage in these things (well, except the last) but the issue is that it has become a way to limit and classify people. And yes, this constrains guys too. But I’ve found it to be a massive driving force in the way that especially women behave on campus. We already function in a competitive environment where the community is so close knit that gossip travels faster than through the Internet. This exacerbates the issues that so many women on campus face in the way they see themselves. You’re a slut, or you’re boring. You’re an irrational Vedica, or you’re an apologist Cool Girl. We’ve devised our own set of stultifying labels and roles for women on campus, and if you leave law school with your self confidence intact after 5 years, it’s a genuine miracle.

The Cool Girl has internalized these labels, adopted them as a part of her personality, thereby creating a vogue of being chill, and ergo, being quiet. In many ways, the Cool Girl is a modern variant of the age-old gender role of requiring women to be meek-mannered and wordless. Today, her voice is constrained not by a requirement to be quiet, but to be chill.

From someone who’s recently started breaking away, to the dozens I know are unsure of themselves. I can give you a sermon like I’ve had an epiphany and could write a self-help book (typical law schoolite obviously). But I’d rather just end by saying that maybe you won’t overhaul the patriarchy in law school, but you’ll definitely end up happier once you dump the Cool Girl.

Love,

A Proud Non-Cool Girl

Over the last year and a half, NLS has experienced waves of feminist movements. While a large part of it can be attributed to the Alliance of Oversensitive Women (AoW) for concerted efforts towards ensuring that sexism on campus becomes a central issue, a big push has also come from other different corners, be it the 4th year RCC class amending its RCC rules to out sexual harassment convicts to potential employers or the 3rd year girls standing up against the internalized culture of silence amongst the boys of the batch. I personally believe that the time is ripe for another gender norm at NLS to break which is,  women not running for the office of the Student Bar Association.

In the last two decades, SBA has had only 3 women Presidents and two Vice-Presidents. While I do not have the data for all the candidates who contested in this period, in the span of 2013-17, there have only been 2 women candidates, and both of them assumed office. (Shrishti, 2014, President and Shraddha, 2016, Vice-President) It is not my claim that there  should always be a woman office bearer and definitely not that one gender in office is better than the other. Instead, this is an exhortation to those women on the edge or even those thousands of metres behind the ‘laxman rekha’ as to why they should take the plunge this election season. I’ll attempt to do that by reflecting on the decisions I made during my term to highlight how the functioning of the office can be impacted by gender.

Decision making is gendered

AoW, upon its formation called out sexist comments made on campus via posters on the 19 (1) (a) notice board. It sparked a heated conversation as those who the statements could be attributed to posed a spirited defense that the statements (not all of course) were in jest and calling out was devoid of context. Around the same time, many classmates on my Himalaya group, argued that all alumni on the SBA noticeboard online forum should be immediately removed. Even though I initially resisted and was not comfortable because I believed that the timing of such a request wasn’t appropriate given that the alumni had shown their support for the feminist movement, I ultimately gave in to the request.  I felt that it was a legitimate request as my batchmates were only asking me to fulfill my duty of ensuring that the SBA Notice board has no alumni to give the current students a safe space to discuss college issues. In fact that had been the purpose of having a separate group, much before any of this began. While the intervention in this particular case was termed welcome by a certain section of the student body, there was another section which believed and continues to believe that this intervention was uncalled for.

They felt that this intervention  points towards the rooted sub-conscious systemic bias that occurs in decision-making. This is especially because it was made after  a male-only discussion, asked for by males, in a conversation about male power at a very specific juncture. It also shows the issue with hearing some plaints over others. Even if the decision to remove Alumni would have been arrived at notwithstanding any bias,  the process followed to arrive at this decision unintentionally excluded major stakeholders, including my Vice-President Shraddha, from the decision making process. It certainly did influence my decision-making though I may agree (to this date) with the rationale behind it. Shraddha, to this date disagrees.  

Going a bit further, this decision was a product of my association with the guys of the batch as I share the hostel and a very active social media group with them. The level of familiarity and comfort is immense, so much so that I turned to them for counsel as well as help on most issues that crop up. This is natural and inevitable. For instance, in the last trimester, once the faculty recruitment notification got out in the last trimester, I needed a hefty assessment report of existing faculty to facilitate an informed decision-making. I do not trust “call for applications” since then the work only gets completed  by deadline + many more months. This, I felt, was extremely urgent and had to be finished in a month. I had to handpick the committee as a result. While they did submit the report bang on time, out of 9 of them, only 2 were girls. Thus this process restricted involvement of women in an important exercise.

Prioritisation of women’s issues

At any given point, SBA is liasoning with the administration for multiple issues. Some are huge and extend all year long while others keep coming up as and when. They are taken up depending upon the bargaining capital, urgency of the situation and relative importance as compared to other issues. What is to be prioritized and deemed for urgent action is indeed decided at the discretion of those in office. Ideally your leader should be empathetic, but there is a difference between empathizing and prioritizing. For instance, securing equal access to the football field for women was on my manifesto. However, in my head, electives and recruitment were the top priority. I was heavily invested in those two and despite timely reminders for the field, I genuinely believed that ‘it can wait’ as I did not want us to look unreasonable before the administration with so many demands at one go.

I finally drafted and sent the petition only in the vacation before the third trimester. It took only one meeting and one mail for things to change. In retrospect, it could have been done earlier at any point of time, along with the other issues and not necessarily after. But because it was pushed down the priority list, it meant that half the student body had to wait for 8 extra months for equal access of a common space. Moreover, it was never even taken up as an issue by the office bearers before me. They tell you to ask the woman question, sometimes you don’t know what that question itself is unless you experience it on your own.

Normalisation of the Idea

Hollywood had its moment recently with the release of Black Panther. It’s an Afro-futuristic movie and it portrays a black kingdom and a black superhero in an everyday setting. It creates a positive message that such characters can be easy to relate to. When I joined law school, I heard Rajat Gangwar giving his speech to us on the orientation day. He eased us into the university and was the go to person for any problems. I remember many boys were awestruck, harbored SBA ambitions and some were touted as the next president from our batch. None of the girls were ever mentioned. I believe that seeing a woman in office or at least running for it would lead to normalization of the idea amongst the girls that women can and should run for this post and also provide a role model for them to aspire towards.  

Fixing the scarcity problem

In a panel discussion held by AoW on the experiences of women in the workplace, Richa Naujoks (Partner at Nixon Peabody) said  “you make a female person a Partner [in a law firm] because of her performance, but a male person a Partner because of expectations.” In the last five years, 3 elections have been uncontested with both male candidates who stood getting a position each. While there was mostly someone in opposition, they ended up backing out before the election day. NLS is a small ecosystem with about 500 voters. Males from 4th and 5th year LLB batches usually contest the election. It deprives the student body of a wider option to choose from, and often, as pointed out, there isn’t a choice. The problem can partly be fixed if the other half participated in the democratic process by actively vying for the office, giving the guys a  run for their money.

The office of SBA in a university like NLS where most activities and initiatives are entirely student run is crucial. It would be wrong to say that any gender accounts for better leadership. At the end of the day, a candidate needs to be judged on his or her work ethic, track record, agendas, ideals, approachability and various other objective factors. However, at the same point, it is pertinent to recognize that there is indeed value to women running for political offices because of the advantages as pointed out as well as sub-conscious differences that may exist. In all the instances cited above, I would still have done what I did, there wasn’t anything wrong given my limitations and associations at the time. The point is that there is a possibility that it could have been done differently. With anyone yet to announce candidature, here’s hoping that the norm changes this year!

Neither traditional culture nor the pop variety teaches women how to be alone. Most, if not all, organized religions are pretty explicit in their disapproval of single/widowed/divorced women (or women of any sort really, but that’s another discussion). Even in literary/cinematic imagination, the Sexy Lone Male WolfTM is a much more popular trope than the Batshit Cat LadyTM .

To be a woman and to be alone is to be a failure, for our primary worth is supposed to be defined by our relationships and the caring labour we perform within them. You’re not allowed to ‘take time out for yourself’, because somebody always needs your time more than you do. There is always the ‘women’s safety card’ to chain you down if that doesn’t work. Which is why it is so important for young women to go solo-tripping, even if it be just to Gopalan to catch the latest shitty rom-com, to know and to experience the reality of being alone and surviving it. I toured a European city by myself, and what do you know I’m still alive, as alive as you can be in the middle of 4 th year and two legit electives anyway.

What was I doing in Europe, anyway? I was just, you know, participating in Student of the Year, as part of the fancy curriculum at Pindal Professional Global Law School with my best friends Shanaya and Raj. Raj has failed exams twice and is adept at playing the banjo. His catchphrase is ‘Palat’. I was doing all my travelling in Raj’s Italian sports car. The competition involved a treasure hunt in Paris followed by a swimming marathon in the river Danube…

…Yes, I was travelling on FAP, for an international competition. Admittedly, being a LFT requires privilege. None of this, including the delicious scrumptilicious rose-shaped chocolate- raspberry icecream at Gelato Rosa, Szent István tér 3, would have happened if it hadn’t been for the generous dole handed out by the college in exchange for a display of my semi-competent sabzi mandi bargaining skills.

LFT-ing in Europe is a lot more convenient than in India for many reasons. First, Free Walking Tours. You have the advantage of being with a large crowd and covering all the major tourist spots, even if you don’t have a companion or a personal tour guide. Obviously they aren’t really free; you’re supposed to give a nominal fee at your discretion at the end of the tour, as a token of your appreciation. But I didn’t mind paying the money. Did guys twice my age hit on me randomly while walking? Um, yes. Did I clutch my purse to me the entire time like it was my baby? I protected Bagwati more than I ever will my own flesh and blood during a holiday.

Would I ever have learnt that Austria and Hungary are jigri dost, and the Hungarian palace has been perennially bombed, and the miseries suffered by the Hungarian people due to *gasp* communism? Maybe. But man, they ripped a large one in that palace, those British airplanes. Second, most European cities have free Wifi everywhere, which means even if you can’t catch a Walking Tour, you can just pull out Google Maps and do a self-Walking Tour instead. Almost every major tourist attraction will be around the city square, so you won’t have to wander too much. I won’t lie though, there were at least one or two moments when I had to look deeply into the ice-blue eyes of a handsome Slavic hulk and give a seductive hairflip, to which he would reply, ‘Ich wib kein englis’ which means ‘I will love you passionately and till the end of my time’ in German. Just kidding.

LFT-ing while on a budget means that no Raj or Rahul is going to come in his BMW to ferry you around Europe. Raj and Rahul certainly ain’t gonna help you lug your suitcase on the convoluted route you have to take via bus, tram and metro line to your AirBnB so as to avoid being looted by hyperinflated cab prices. I have never been as regretful of packing 20 sets of fancy clothes in  Nagarbhavi Circle. I know now that I truly am a strong independent woman who needs no man to carry her bags. I also know that I will possibly be forever haunted, given the number of curses everyone else who wanted to get on that tram gave me.

Speaking of hyper-inflation, a particularly enlightening, blissful LFT moment was when, after walking for 2 hours to reach a bathhouse in Budapest, I discovered that they required at least 10,000 HUF to be paid in cash-no cards or any other form of transaction accepted. I guess the whole demonetization thing is still to catch on there. So I walked back to the tram station where I came from, as for some strange reason no bank had thought of putting an ATM nearby this evidently cash-hungry place. No wonder they’re having an economic crisis!!

Another lesson for aspiring LFT’s-don’t expect your trip to be flowers and daisies. There will be blood, sweat and tears involved, in addition to cracked soles and pernicious growths on the underside of your toes. Needless to say, by the time I finally got into the spa, it was no longer just another tickbox on my tourist checklist.

As I was contemplating on eternal philosophical mysteries such as what is the purpose my existence on earth, what goal was I born to achieve, is NLS actually just a psychological experiment run by a certain Dr. Padma to study the effects of sleeplessness, multiple deadlines and bureaucratic trauma on young adults, and so on, I was joined by a Turkish political scientist in the Jacuzzi. Before your imagination turns, ahem, steamy, we had a perfectly platonic conversation about our different cultures and educational backgrounds.

Yes I was in a public bathhouse with a heterosexual man and he did not molest me. Yes I was in a swimsuit and he did ask me out on a date and I said no because I am the heartless friendzoning bitch your favourite Dank Shitty Meme Page TM always warned you about. Yet, we continued having a polite conversation. Yes it is possible for men and women to be in intimate spaces wearing close to nothing and not you know, ravage each other in mindless lust like on the covers of 18 th century bodice rippers. Before I hurt anyone’s sentiments, I’m not trying to suggest that foreign men are somehow more adept at understanding consent women. My point is that these instances do pop up in life every now and then, like the rats in the Women’s Hostel water coolers.

I know what’s on your mind now. No, apart from what a gigantic slut/idiot I am for hanging out in a Jacuzzi with a guy who’s not my boyfriend/husband/whatever. Didn’t I face racism? Wait, or were you thinking about food? I missed Atithi and Maneruchi more than I missed my mom. At one point I even felt a hint of emotion towards mess food. European restaurants are tremendously expensive, and to make up for that, they have tremendously cheap street food. A pepperoni slice costs half or one-third the amount it would at home, and is twice as filling. As you can see, I’m an ardent believer in the high carbs, high protein diet.

It is scientifically established that women love seeking attention. I am no exception. Which is why when the pizza stall guy recommended I take a slice with jalapenos because I’m a ‘spicy Indian girl’ I was totally flattered. There is nothing more I wanted to hear than have the shopkeeper leer ‘Mirchi Mirchi’ at me while handing over the pizza. My DDLJ dream was complete. He even knew Hindi! Some memories are to be cherished forever. So you need not worry about racism or any sort of cultural stereotyping.

To wash down Mr. Spicy’s flirtatious zingers, I decided to get a drink. Budapest is famous for its ruin bars, pubs set up in the Old Jewish Quarter, in buildings/lots abandoned after World War II. The dark history of the exodus that took place then aside, if you want to experience European nightlife, there was no way you would miss out on Szimpla Kert. You know a place is meant for getting intoxicated if one of its distinctive features is a used car hanging down in the middle of the ceiling.

Except that there was a slight problem. I identify as a woman. Notwithstanding my supposed resemblance to a certain SBA office bearer, I look like a woman. I sure as hell was an alone woman, unless I was wrong about the Turkish dude being a gentleman and he decided to stalk me because according to Bollywood logic that’s the best way to get a Spicy Indian GirlTM . So any sane, rational woman would have obviously turned back and gone back to the AirBnB. If you haven’t already figured this out, I’m clearly bonkers. Screw Kirron Kher logic, the Palinka was calling out to me. To my surprise, I found an elderly Indian couple sitting next to me at the bar. I guess it was the Doing Unindian Things festival that day. Even after this little sojourn I did not go back to the hotel. I spent the rest of the evening at the Schezenyi Bridge, looking at the stars, in the backdrop of violin music. It was quite romantic. If only Spicy Guy had been there to share the moment with me.

Maybe I got lucky. Maybe if I had taken a different tram, or gone to a different bathhouse, or to a different bar, I would have been kidnapped by a sex trafficking ring. Maybe I was really stupid in the way I went about all of this. God knows I should have withdrawn more cash before going to that bathhouse. Where’s PayTM when you need it damnit? I’ll be honest and recommend that maybe you shouldn’t take it as an authoritative guide on how to travel in Europe. But remember that happy endings are overrated. Sometimes a fairytale is about taking the most mundane, frustrating, weird and possibly sweaty experience you have and making the most out of it. So stop waiting for Prince Charming/Raj/Dil Chahta Hai/Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara/Hangover/Generic Road Trip Movie GangTM . Be a LFT. And if you ever have the pleasure of meeting Spicy Guy, tell him I miss him!

Why does the New Year start on January 1 if Jesus was born on December 25? This is a question that has bothered us for a long time and none of the explanations that we could find on the Internet seemed to make any sense. One explanation that is offered is that while December 25 is the day of Christ’s ‘immaculate conception’, it is on New Year’s Day that he was actually born. Although this might be a product of a poor CBSE education, we’ve been taught that babies tend to spend more than six days inside their mommies. Then again, my CBSE education didn’t quite cover ‘immaculate conception’.

Another explanation that we found had something to do with the Roman Empire. As far as we know, there weren’t any wrestling franchises around when Christ was born and so, we’re dismissing that one too.

There is one explanation that we’d like to offer instead, and this would perhaps make sense to you too – It is fair to imagine that when our Lord and savior was born, all of the town of Bethlehem wanted to throw a party. But like the rains that seek to kill univ-week every year, the weather in Bethlehem messed up their plans. Sadly, for them, they did not have first years who could simply cover the place up with tarps and mop up the water when the rains were done. Thus, they had to wait a whole 6 days before they could throw a party. So on the sixth evening when the skies had finally cleared up, they decided to get wasted in honour of the little baby that had graced them with its presence. As it turned out, this party was so good that they decided that they’d throw one every year on the same day. Since they needed an excuse for this, they decided that it would be on that day that the New Year would start.

Since then, there has much that has changed with the world but there is one thing that has remained a constant – the party on New Year’s eve. Improvisations have been made to suit the times (although I have no idea what they did in the Prohibition Era) but the party has always carried on. Now, there are millions of New Year parties that are celebrated by gatherings of families and friends across the world. But over and above these, there are several places across the world that promise an iconic New Year’s eve – Times Square in New York, the banks of the Thames in London, the Las Vegas strip, and several others. But one party that has gone unnoticed to the world is the one celebrated by a small group of pseudo-intellectuals from the distant village of Nagarbhavi.

The parties hosted by this cult are things of legend. Soaked in Old Monk, these parties involve several hours of penance where the heathens of the National Law School dance ritually to 90s music in a trance induced by fumes of cannabinoids (some people stay sober; they’re pretty cool too).

We’ve been to these parties before, and sometimes we’ve got them wrong. Sometimes that cocktail was good, very good, so good in fact that we don’t remember having our fifteenth and were drooling in the toilet when the clock struck 12.  Other times we’ve paced ourselves, thinking this year will be the year we’ll be pleasantly hammered when the moment arrives, only to find that we spent the crucial seconds supporting that drunk friend who thinks he’s Captain Jack Sparrow.

We’ve tried angling for a new year’s kiss. You wake up reasonably satisfied with your efforts until you hear about what your friends did and the fomo hits you hard. So the following year you decide to go hard at the party with the brothers, only to find that this year everyone else is establishing a sure thing and the only story you have is a tragic tale of a third wheel.

There was that year when we tried jumping in a fish pond and were saved by one of those cool sober people. There was that year when said sober person started drinking and we returned the favor. We’ve rolled down hills, had literal pissing contests, and done much more. But after all this, you’re left wondering – how does one #RazeTheBar? Is there a secret?

Four years and several billion parties later, there is an answer. Always have that drink, but always sipping. Help the drunk, but only till you find someone else who can replace you.  Try keeping your brothers together if they stray – you’re their shepherd. And lastly, avoid the fifth years, they’re emo and will make you down – yes, we will too.

In hip hop culture, diss tracks are the way in which the stories of the greatest rap rivalries have unfolded. The “beef” between Kendrick and Drake is essentially a bunch of rap tracks with a line here or there making a snide reference to the other. The same goes for Nas and Tupac and Kanye and Jay Z (maybe it was more than a line when Kanye releases a song titled “Kill Jay Z”). This is a reduction of conflict to the literal in a space which allows you to broadcast it immediately to the world at large, assured that it will reach its intended target. It is a phenomenon I would call Diss Piece Discourse (or, if said with food in your mouth, “Dispy Disco”), and I would love to spend a few hundred words building a theory around this phenomenon. But let’s get to the reason you’re reading this, law school.

Law School communication has evolved from the start of my time here. The SBA Noticeboard has become an institution in its own right. While the old SBA page was mostly used for congratulating moot wins and general bragging while desperately trying to fight the shadow of falling law school standards, something changed with the SBA Noticeboard. The Noticeboard was a space of expression devoted singularly to the 400 people around you. There are multiple e-mail threads and controversies shaping this context if you’re willing to dig deep into your mails, but one thing is clear, no one estimated the force SBA Noticeboard would become. Mail threads just aren’t in anymore. Writing an e-mail is just too cumbersome: you have to move away from the social media you were earlier browsing to a glib Gmail user interface, open a new window, type in the recipients (hesitate for a minute before you type in pgstudents and mppstudents; you only do that if its really major), and then you type out your valuable contribution. Facebook is much more instantaneous, you’re on Facebook anyway, you click a notification, give your unsolicited opinion, press enter and go back to looking at doggo memes.

If you add batch/project group/PFL team/committee whatsapp groups to the mix, you now have a deadly combination on your hands. Not only is this super instantaneous, it demands a reply. It’s possible someone didn’t check their mail or their Facebook for a long period of time, but no one abandons their phone for that long. The ability of whatsapp groups, through both its “seen” feature and the expectation of a reply ends up demanding discourse. You’re officially ignoring if you were to leave a whatsapp message on “read”.

The ability of the SBA Noticeboard (and to a lesser but much more incisive extent, Whatsapp groups) to provide a common ubiquitous platform to air every grievance/need/opinion/thought/idea/rumination/question/wetdream/complaint/suggestion/whine/doubt/demand/fear/inquiry/more-whine/recommendation/contribution/some-more-whine/discussion has led to the evolution of diss piece discourse in law school. A form of communication where we talk to people in our immediate surroundings by tagging them on posts, alluding to easily decipherable anonymised references (saying things like “a certain 2^nd year”- for a place with only 400 people, almost everyone should assume that everyone knows everything) and worst of all, by not even referring to them. The saddest bit about the SBA Noticeboard is the complete and absolute bureaucratisation of interaction amongst the student body. Instead of asking the person responsible for a certain thing, there’s an increased tendency to float the question to the world and ask if “something can be done about this”. A malevolent hurricane of snide remarks and passive aggressive responses stringing together the bits and pieces that make this place up, reminding everyone of their jobs with the sheer force of visibility and laying bare the emptiness of our social worlds.

In a small student body of 400 trapped together for half a decade, what can keep us from driving each other insane is simply knowing each other. The next time a presidential candidate tells you they’re “approachable”, take a small breath and understand the rotten implication. When the mere achievement of being someone people ask questions to is converted into successful virtue-propaganda, realise what it says about general law school interaction. We were all too occupied with our responsibilities and our deadlines and our commitments that somewhere along the way we forgot to speak to each other normally, like human beings do. Now, when I want someone to stop singing at Chetta, the default reaction is to fire up that Noticeboard button with a healthy dose of self-righteousness and broadcast my whine. I can flare my whine up to all of the law school population and eventually someone will see it and do something about it if I tag them enough times. More so, I have the ability to demand a discussion on what I want to whine about. Joking around is trivialising the topic, we must all take my whine equally seriously. My victory in one of those unfortunate comment threads is quantified with likes. It is my bureaucratic fantasyland reality show where I have the license to become the human embodiment of an annoying notification, a space of absolute and unqualified entitlement, a story where I am both the protagonist and the author.

 It’s no different from a rapper writing a bunch of lyrics about some other rapper, the passive-aggressive degenerate clone of a rap battle. The next time you decide to broadcast your whine, just release a diss track. Atleast we’ll have new music to listen to.