11 highlights
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They continue to do so, some without doing away with their rooted sense of identity with their home state, while some are âconvertsâ, who seek the âhappening citizenshipâ of the coffee shop circuit and wardrobe makeover of the metro-wannabe (the DU hostel lingo for the latter is âBBCâ, i.e. Bihari Ban Gaya CAT- Casual American Teenager).
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Both these reports somehow take me back to the late Nineties, when âkiller instinctâ (or rather the lack of it) was the overused phrase in the media narrative on the Indian sports scene, and thousands of educational migrants from Bihar and UP were academically outshining (and in many cases, even outnumbering) Delhites in Central Universities like DU and Jawaharlal Nehru University.
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So how does the London Olympicâs artistic antidote to George Orwellâs description of modern sporting culture as âwar minus shootingâ fit in the narrative of educational migrants in Delhi University?
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On one hand there are reports about the London Olympics having a public art project with the loser and the loss as the focus in a success-obsessed world. (âA loserâs spirit is not as vulgar as the killer instinctâ, The Times of India, July 25, 2012).
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And on the other, completing the month long ritual of âeducational reportingâ, even Non-Delhi papers have reports and photographs of freshers joining different colleges of Delhi University (as if university education in India doesnât extend beyond DU).
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âTetanusâ, recalled my Bihari seniors in Delhi University, was the word used for them when some of them joined DU in the late Eighties and early Nineties. The word was some sort of a âquasi-racial backlashâ (as Dr AN Das describes in his work The Republic of Bihar) unleashed by people who were elbowed out by Biharis from premier institutions of the capital, with their academic excellence
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Tetanus was a derogatory reference to the âinfectionâ that students from Bihar were supposed to carry because of the humble rusted steel trunks with which they boarded trains for New Delhi railway station.
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Careerist success and examination cracking âkiller instinctâ is one thing, but has the mechanics of that distanced the young Bihari minds from the original spirit of intellectual inquiry, observations of life, nature and universe and horizons of creativity?
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The slender presence of Bihar in fundamental research and defining creativity should worry the âachievingâ society which young Biharis are getting trapped into.
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A different question, more akin to the question addressed by the art project in London Olympics, is what about the thousands who donât make it to the list of successful candidates after devoting prime years of their youth to preparing for competitive examination?
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Amartya Sen poses the question in his work Identity and Violence and finds it weird that someone scoring 299 (hypothetically) could be punished with joblessness and someone scoring 300 could be rewarded with lifelong privileged living as a bureaucrat.