'Age no bar for DUSU Polls' reports the Hindustan Times
The presidential candidates of ABVP and NSUI for Delhi University Students Union - Gargi Lakhanpal and Amrita Dhawan - are doing their graduation for the second time. Amrita, who is a commerce graduate from Bharti college, is pursuing an undergraduate course in History from the same college...
Gargi, on the other hand, first completed her Bachelor's degree in History from Lakshmi Bai college and then went on to join Aurobindo College last year for contesting the DUSU joint secretary's post, but did not appear for her exams. This year she has enrolled for BA with Aditi college saying it is more 'professionally oriented'.
Yeah, especially when the 'profession' she has in mind is a career in politics. Apaprently she tried to join a post-graduate course, but failed and hence settled for undergrad.
Two questions come to mind:
a) Why are such applicants admitted? Obviously under union pressure
b) Can we call such people 'students' at all?
I mean the primary goal of ordinary students is to study. Which is obviously the last thing on the minds of these people. Naturally they are disconnected from the real concerns and issues important to genuine students.
It's a vicious cycle. Genuine students keep away from politics. So these fake students step in to fill the vaccum. Seeing the kind of 'leadership' which exists, even the few genuine students who may contemplate standing for elections are scared away. And the rot continues.
As the HT article notes, most 'student leaders' are in their early 30s! NSUI, has therefore set an 'upper age limit of 27. But NSUI office bearers are all over 30 or nearing it. ABVP doesn't even pretend to have an age limit. The state gen. secy Nakul Bhardwaj told HT: "You can be a student at 40 too."
This ridiculous annual exercise - as well as the tragic muder of a professor n Ujjain by 'student' leaders - prompted me to write this column for sify.com.
It's called 'Students, politics and career paths'.
On an unrelated note: The HT website is not very helpful. I can't provide a link to the article quoted above because I can't find it - either on google or HT online. I trawled through their epaper archive but while I could view the article there I could not copy-paste it (that 'function is disabled') or link to it.
It would have been faster to type in the relevant paras - which is what I finally did. Web edition ka kya fayda?
