Jamia Mass Com issue - a different perspective

Jamia Millia Islamia is in the news again and this time the credit goes to our students from Mass Communication who have always done us proud and have contributed to Jamia's fame. It is the reason why thousand of students every year buy our prospectus, apply, appear for drilling admission tests, pray to all possible gods, try all possible means and pay not a very large amount for fees...and all because they want to study in the AJK Centre for Mass Communication in Jamia. Big name. Produces even bigger names. Big deal really. Once a student qualifies that entrance, beats some thousand others, gets it into his/her head that he/she is going to make it BIG (yet again) in the media industry, the dreary college life of Jamia, which includes attending classes, passing exams and earning a 75% attendance, obviously gets a little uninteresting and challenge-less for our future media professionals. Reason why many of them choose not to attend classes. Reason why under the regime of a strict Vice Chancellor, some 17 of them manage to get debarred from examinations. Oh no, of course they had medical certificates and of course the officials failed to understand their trouble to turn up for classes and of course called their medical certificates fake. So the students from our reputed Anwar Jamal Kidwai Centre for Mass Communication decide to communicate their displeasure at authority and follow the steps of the very founders of Jamia Millia Islamia who had stood up against the British in the Non Co-operation movement and established an institute, separate from Aligarh Muslim University (that believed in co-operation with the British).

Analogies apart, our students have been sleeping on the footpaths and keeping a hunger strike, protesting against the atrocities that have been meted out to them by the cruel cruel authorities that did not let them sit for their exams. They have been screaming 'Jamia murdabaad' and this is where my problem lies. What has Jamia done? Well, has been strict for a change. But is it so wrong for a University to expect its students to attend class? I have read comments such as 'oh they showed the same films over and over again' and 'oh the teachers were always absent'! well, then you should have protested against a slack faculty, instead of being slack yourself. And I cannot believe that people were not warned beforehand. I am in the Faculty for Humanities and Languages where people are way lazier and even then we were constantly told that this year attendance mattered and that we would not be spared. But of course, you had to be in class in the first place to hear the warnings! The protesters are calling it their 'right to education'. Of course everyone has the right to education but when you get the right, you also have duties to perform. Jamia takes you - your right. you attend class - your duty. You fail to perform your duty and poof goes your right to your right.

I guess we all have a certain resentment against anyone who is in power. That is alright. But we cannot blame them always for our own shortcomings. Of course they have flaws. Who doesn't? But we are not plain innocent either. Both parties do things to aggravate matters. I even read a comment from one of them saying that maybe the attendance sheets don't reach the authorities correctly. Well, I am from the student community and I can assure them that I have myself seen professors signing them, submitting to the department and the departments submitting them to the dean offices from where it goes to the Vice Chancellor. No one's attendance is tampered with. The authorities are not vindictive towards the students. They do want everyone to graduate. Its just that the line has to be drawn somewhere.

Yes, I know I sound like an authority bum licker. I do see the student perspective as well. But all you had to do was attend class. If spending money and not being able to sit for an exam is an issue, wasn't spending money and not attending class one? I don't mind students protesting. They can protest all they want. I simply do not like the way they are maligning Jamia. I love my university, with all its history, heritage and shortcomings and I do not want a bunch of kids who are too big for their boots to do it any harm.

P.S - The very fact that I have written after so long should convey how much this means to me. Apologies to anyone whose "right to education" this might have hurt. thank you.