miss fresher's night - by subroto mukerji

8/9/2019 Miss Fresher's Night - By Subroto Mukerji

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Miss Fresher's Nightby SubrotoMukerji

Men are given to celebration; they love spectacle,

and so they are always on the lookout for a spectacular way ofcelebrating something by whatever means appear to beappropriate. This could help explain victory processions,seasonal festivals, fertility rites, or even the ritualistic changingof the guard at a certain palace on a certain foggy little isle inthe Northern Hemisphere.

Heathens danced around the Maypole or offeredhuman sacrifices to Baal. The Greeks answered with theirOlympic games. The Romans fed early Christians to lions, and

gladiators fought and killed each other for the crowds benefit,morituri salutamus and all that, topping it all off by organizingextravagantly-overdone Bacchanalian revels and veiled Vestalvirgins. Miss Freshers Night is Stephanias unique response.

I use the present tense because I havent botheredto check whether the event that marked the peak as well asthe culmination of ragging, has managed to survive to thepresent day. Probably not, forhorror of horrorsthere arenow real, live females in Stephania1in residence, to boot!

Who, and under the evil influence of what, allowedthis miscarriage of democracy to come about, I do not know nordo I care to find out. Post mortems do not interest meparticularly. All I know is that sacrilege has been perpetrated.No more will the likes of Jainder Singh or Jitu Gohain crawl out ofbed after a nights revels and stagger to breakfast just in timeto beat the 9.00 AM deadline.

No one cared to remark on their grumpiness, their

unshaved cheeks, their tousled hair or the crumpled pyjamas. Itwas all part of their personae. With femme fatales around, therewill never again be any more genuine Jainders and Jitus. Sad.

Incidentally, Jainders room was a true work ofspontaneous modern art: it always looked as it was meant to

1 St. Stephen's College, New Delhi, India is known by this name to its inmates

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look: a Daliesque 3-D mural created by a wayward Texastornado that had sucked up books, old newspapers, notes,tutorials, back issues of Playboy, sundry items of attire andtoilet articles, and, after mixing them thoroughly, had scatteredthem in surreal, knee-deep, wall-to-wall confusion. Such

wonders will have passed forever from the sight of men, forfemales have overrun the last frontier. Stephania will never bethe same again.RIP.

All this foregoing is, naturally, part and parcel of myargument as to why the memory of the original annual MissFreshers Contest is even more meaningful from a historicalpoint of view. With so many misses joining as freshmen (whichparadox makes the muddle all the more hideous), how couldthere be a Miss Fresher? There would have to be a Master

Fresher as well, a title hardly euphonic or even logical, aridiculous exercise in futility. Nevertheless, let us return to thegolden days when men were men, and the only sex (barring afew notable exceptions: see Stephania or Bust!) resident inCollege.

Now, given Mans propensity for celebrating at thedrop of a brasorry, hat (see how rattled I am with all thisfemales-in-College bit), the Miss Freshers Annual Contest was aBIG ONE! Here, half-a-dozen freshmen of tender years, whose

lack of fully-developed secondary sexual characteristics viz.facial hair etc., and smooth complexions which, apparently,were entirely due to copious use of Lux soapthe creator of

Fair & Lovely cream was in diapers then, and unable to play anactive rolewere cosmetically metamorphosed for a night intoersatz women and pitted against each other for the title.

Rules of the arena were followed; thumbs downmeant the participant was axed, whilst the loudest whistles,cheers, and obvious unanimity of the experts in the crowd of

seniors automatically threw up a winner. The object of thewhole exercise, I suspect, was to prove, over and over again,how right Tennyson was when he wrote:

Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, matchdwith mine,

Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine---

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A panel of seniors whittled the field down to aboutten contestants, some of whom were Benjamin Gilani (Eng.Hons.), Dennis Michael Joseph (Eng. Hons.), Rajiv Sethi (Hist.Hons.), Barun Lal Barua (Phy. Hons.), Saket Mohan (Hist. Hons.),

andto my dismaythe undersigned (also Hist. Hons.)!

Costumes were designed and re-designed; make-upmen practiced feverishly, while certain light-fingered fellowswere commissioned as cosmetics and accessories suppliers.Sisters, mothers, and even girlfriends must have complainedbitterly about choice goodies that mysteriously vanishedovernight from vanity cases and lingerie drawers.

The venue, as usual, was the JCR (the Junior

Combination Rooma classic bit of convoluted nomenclature sotypical of Stephania). It was, as its name deliciously hints, therecreation room. It had a music room equipped with a state-of-the-art stereo record player-amplifier-speaker system, ablysupported by about three dozen or so LPs (which meant LongPlaying records, designed to be played on a turn-table set torotate at 33 RPM (revolutions per minute). There werecaroms, and a table-tennis table that saw a lot of action. Andthere was the television set.

In the early sixties, television was a novelty. In TheBeginning was Doordarshan (a single channel, thankfully),which dished out sundry garbage for viewers to take or toleave; a monopoly, I believe its called. Im sure that, for mostpeople, ownership of a TV set was a just a personal statement,more of a status symbol than a real source of entertainment orenlightenment. (some things never change---it still is, only thesets grow more sophisticated with each passing year, withmanufacturers adding a plethora of features in competitivedesperation, features that few users either need or know how to

use).

DDs signature tune gave me the creeps, as it stilldoes. Imagination has never been DDs strong point. Creativitywas an optional extraa novelty discouraged in a State-sponsored outfit. Images were fuzzy, studio subjects poorly litand composed, and sound quality was terrible even if one had

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the premium, up-market, State-owned (naturally!) Uptron brand(which Stephanias JCR did). At that moment, however, I wasdeeply thankful that the event was not being recorded fortelecast.

DD was a staunch follower of Henry Ford I;customers could have any color (of image, in this case: not car)as long as it was black. White was thrown in for free, a value-addition that did not go unappreciated by the novocognoscenti,the new breed of TV couch potatoes. If white failed to appear attimes, no one complained; one doesnt look a gift horse in themouth, does one? It speaks volumes for the human penchantfor novelty, that large numbers of the image-hungry (andimage-conscious, too, it may be said) residents sat around theset, steadily devouring the miasma it spewed forth.

My life-long aversion to The News, going back to theearly days of valve radio-sets, was given a fresh lease of life bya fiendish variation devised by DD to torture a captiveaudience. A newscaster called Salma Sultan was the only audio-visual guaranteed to please. The sole program worth watching(at least as far as I was concerned) was a pot-pourri of globalhappenings called Mirror of the World, anchored by PrakashMirchandani. He was succeeded by Kabir Bedi, who did anequally splendid job.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Kabir in College. Hewas a Sherwoodian two years my senior, a serious, intellectualtype with a physique like that of a Greek God who did his bit onthe sports field with determination if not always with distinction.His mind seemed to be on higher things, even then. The Godshad smiled on Kabir, blessing him with the amazing good looksand boyish charm that remain with him till today.

He accepted the rare gift of manly beauty graciouslyif somewhat absent-mindedly, never really conscious of it or

hamstrung by it. He was, and is in essence, a person of thespirit. He really is, believe me! His many marriages andumpteen relationships are only indications that he is searching,searchingone day, like his medieval namesake, I'm sure he'llfind what he's looking for.

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It was all the more galling for me to find that in hisfinal year, I had, by some unlucky fluke, equaled his marks inthe senior school General Knowledge examination. To makematters worse, my being two years his junior meant I got twograce points by way of weightage, which landed the prize, so

deservedly his, in my clumsy hands.

I could never really look Kabir in the eye for a longtime after this. He was unfazed; prizes mattered little to him. Hewas after Life itself, and the Grand Prize it awards its devotees.As we all know, he got itafter Sandokan, he never lookedback. No one ever deserved success more, especially because itdid not spoil him; it simply added even more depth and textureto what was already a masterpiece.

It is said of Paul Baumer that he fell on a day thatwas so sleepily uneventful that, in dispatches, it was tersely

dismissed as being All Quiet On The Western Front.2 MissFreshers day could have matched Paul Baumers last one,dispatch for dispatch: till darkness fell, that is. Then all hellbroke loose, as they say in Westerns. In the music room,temporarily converted into a field greenroom, the contestantswere being readied by their trainers and make-up artists tocharm the yelling, stamping, savages outside.

Bets flew thick and fast as to whose horse wouldwin, for each contestant had a sponsor. Bottles of war paintwere all over the place. Lipstick of all the garish shades possibleto imagine were being thickly coated on lips, and eye shadowseemed to be in more in vogue in Stephania than in the pagesofVogue itself.

As wethe miserable few qualified for thisparticularly testing ordeal for reasons beyond our controlwerebeing readied for the ramp, the restive hooligans outside raiseda clamour fit to raise the dead.

Even through the haze of misery that seemed toenvelope me (for I was, and have always been, staunchlyhetero in my inclinationsdrag was abhorrent to me), I seem toremember that I refused to have my legs shaved.

2 The great anti-war novel out of World War I, by Erich Maria Remarqu.

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D.M. Patel, in school, was rather particular about hislegs, but I was no transvestite. I resisted strongly; so strongly,in fact, that my sponsor backed off: a last-minute substitutewas impossible to arrange.

And so it was that I walked the ramp (I felt I waswalking the plank) in a grass skirt, stuffed bra, and Hawaiianslippers. I was meant to sashay down the catwalk doing thehula.

Unshaved legs under grass skirts are hardly the stuffthat turns a crowd on. When the legs do the Camels Walk (forsome unknown reason, this came to me naturally), and hipsgyrate Elvis Presley fashion, boos and jeers are but natural.

A somewhat prominent set of trapezius and tricepsmuscles, followed by a rippling six-pack (legacy of Sherwoodgym-work), also do nothing for the male libido. Excellent make-up (I have to admit I looked rather fetching in the wig)notwithstanding, I got a standing---er, whats the antonym ofovation? Wodehouse, as lost as I am here, uses the term bird,which I hereby appropriate with gratitude.

Let it be stated here for the record that thedisappointed hooligans gave me the bird in no uncertain

fashion. Boos and hoarse cries of thwarted passion reboundedfrom the rafters; I was hastily recalled by those in eventmanagement. In the ultimate analysis, natural talent will alwayswin hands down.

Rajiv had itin spades. Possessed of sharp,attractive features, a smooth, dusky complexion, wavy hair,large, soulful eyes with lashes to match, he was tall, slim, andwalked with a lissome grace that must have given many aMirandian a complex. The crowd went wildand the title was

his. (Even today, he is a very handsome man. Age has bypassedhim, but not fame, and his thick, black hair is as lustrous asever.

This extraordinarily intelligent and attractive mandominates the countrys cultural scene, a highly creative artistand visionary and Indias globe-trotting cultural ambassador.

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Rajnioops! I mean Rajiv, Indias peripatetic culture czar, hascountless friends among the Bold and the Beautiful of the world,one of them being his long-time chum Bianca Jagger). And tothink that we endured history lectures together, breathing thesame air and yawning at the same lousy jokes! What strange

bedfellows doth Fate bring together !

Subroto Mukerji

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miss fresher's night - by subroto mukerji

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