A stroll in DU ..... Part 1 - The Application

Before I loose the 2-3 readers of this blog, I thought of finally posting something :)

Since the “Delhi University (DU) Admission” was the hot news in the past days when I was in India, so I thought of sharing my short experience with it. I completed my schooling in the fateful year of 1999. Since I had taken the science stream at school, my next target was to study engineering like most of my peers.

Now, I must remind you that 1999 was not a year with many engineering colleges. We only had a few bunch of colleges with really tough entrance tests. It was hard to get an engineering admission back then. We did not had an engineering college in every locality back then like I see today in India. Maybe this was another reason why an engineering degree was a treasured possession and the quality of engineers were also high in those days.

So, like many of my fellow engineering aspirants, I also could not get through the tough entrance tests. But I was not disheartened and decided to drop a year and prepare for the tests for the next year. My father did not liked this idea but made a deal with me that I should at least get admission in DU for graduation and to be more clear, he wanted me to go to North Campus.

Now, I was an ignorant and an arrogant fool back then. I was quite narrow minded back then. I considered DU only for people who can’t get anywhere and this entire North Campus thing a bit overhyped. I also thought that only kids of the rich and famous end up getting admissions in colleges like SGTB Khalsa, Hindu, St. Stephens etc. The only other way was to be a super intelligent freak. I was none of them and maybe this was the reason for the complex. Moreover, the idea of going out in 45 degrees of Delhi heat to fill up forms for the colleges where I had no interest was holding me back. But due to the constant push by my father, I finally went and filled up all the forms. The only good thing about filling up the forms was to have Chole Bhature and Lemon Banta in North Campus. I selected only a handful of colleges to apply for. Hindu, Khalsa, Ramjas and Karori Mal. I did precisely what I had planned and came back home.

The first thing my father asked me in the evening after coming back from work was that why did I not filled up St. Stephens. I clearly told him that neither I am a 99% holder nor the son of any famous personality. Moreover, I told him that this college is so arrogant that it does not even accept normal DU forms. You have to specially buy their individual prospectus at a special price. It was no point discussing with him. He made me go again the next day to specifically fill the form for St. Stephens. With absolutely no interest, I still did it. Then, I got to know about their new level of arrogance. They do not just have a cutoff list but also an interview after that. I was quite furious learning that since I considered it very unfair that even being a part of DU, they have different admission procedures. But, I tried to keep my cool and told myself that since I won’t even get through the cut-off list so there is no point getting angry. I even forgot about it in a couple of days.

The only thing I was happy about was to really feel the DU experience. Seeing students of all shapes, sizes, colors and of course from different walks of life. More than that, the foodie that I was back then, places like Chache-di-Hatti at Kamla Nagar for Chole Bature, Bhelpuri at Patel Chest and the Lemon from the local street vendor are still stamped pretty well in my memories even after all these years.

What happened next will come up in the next post ...