For the first time in my life, I felt that I wasn’t being taken for granted, and that I gained something with every single hour that I spent here.
My personal experience with educational institutions in our country had been disappointing to say the least. My school was sub-standard when it came to imparting knowledge, but it had huge grounds and corridors – decent enough for a 10 year old. Before my board examinations, I joined the supposedly “best” coaching class but it neither contributed to my growth nor my CGPA. Disillusioned, I vowed to never join another coaching class in my life, and taking a step in that direction, I worked hard for the entrance examination of the “best” CBSE junior college in the city. With all that I had heard, I was half-expecting the doors to be draped in gold, but to my dismay, the corridors were smaller and the improvement in educational standards as least as I could expect.
The six or seven months I obsessed over getting into SCMC, I had to constantly remind myself to lower my expectations. And yet the institute’s reputation preceded it, and I found myself on the first day, a bundle of nerves, hoping with all my might for this to be different, and reminding myself to be okay with whatever came my way. In walked Ashish Sir, with a gentle gait and comforting smile, and within the first five minutes, all my inhibitions had been put to rest.
He spelled out the rules – “You have the freedom to walk in or out anytime you want”, “You can interrupt me any number of times for clarifications” and ” The last ten minutes of every class will be for questions, not necessarily limited to the subject”. While every teacher was not as lenient with entry rules as Sir, a common theme throughout the first semester was that this college was going to treat us like adults, with a certain sense of assumed maturity and responsibility. This was reflected in every aspect of the course, including the modes of communication, the extensive Aide memoire, modes of assessment… as well as the rules about eating in class.
For the first time in my life, I felt that I wasn’t being taken for granted, and that I gained something with every single hour that I spent here. The course subjects ranged from media business studies to aesthetics, and even though the sheer volume of material scared me at first, the fear soon metamorphosed into excitement and pride at being chosen to be a part of something this precious. No other media college in the country did this – it was not required to be part of a B.A. (MC) course in the traditional sense, and yet, the college strived to push the limits of both the course as well as its students. The other side of this coin is the responsibility that comes with being treated like an adult. I found myself pushing myself to limits that would normally seem physically and mentally unachievable. It wasn’t easy and it is a natural tendency to focus on the negative aspects of this journey, and yet today as I write this blog post, effortlessly balancing it with a strenuous movie shoot, I realise how much it has given me.
Article by: Prithvi Pudhiarkar (Batch of 2019)
Illustration by: Aditya Dev Sharma (Batch of 2019)
