We live in a populous country, overpopulated being the most common adjective. Our people/km squared stands in the thousands even in rural areas with any semblance of life. In cities, the numbers simply reach astronomical figures, epitomized in day-to-day life by the “hustle-bustle” of the city. Wherever you go, people are pushing along, making their own microscopic spaces within a system that will not yield an inch without an elbow. Each step on the footpath, and each swerve of the car, is a carefully measured move designed to avoid those around you. Space comes at a huge premium, and huge spaces – emptiness – are unnatural.
Now to be honest, emptiness is unnatural. Nature abhors vacuum, and given the chance, she will fill up every bit of available space with something or someone. There’s no better example of this than the endless encroachments of plants and small animals in abandoned houses, and the fungal growth of slums in previously empty fields and under bridges/flyovers. Ergo, space and emptiness have to be created and held against the laws of nature in a country like ours. And when you create something artificially, it is never without purpose.
Such thoughts circled in my mind as I sat on a lazy Monday afternoon in the Professors’ Common Room of Presidency University. I had come to meet someone, to get something signed, and then go off to lunch and submit the thing I needed signed. All that had to happen before my coursework class, which was hardly an hour and half away. Time, then, wasn’t exactly my playmate. Arriving in the huge main room (you can call it a hall by the dimensional standards of the modern ceremony halls) I was greeted with near-emptiness. I duly dumped my bag at a respectable place and headed to the room of the person I sought. The light was on, but no one was in. Probably in class. I’d have to wait.
So I settled into one of the many wooden chairs with green upholstery that now stand guard around three tables arranged in the middle of the room. One presumes these are used to hold meetings of the professors, because the arrangement has a distinct formality to it, whether it is in the drab design of the chairs, the fact that the tables are arranged in a line or the glass top of the central and largest table. Yes, glass tops somehow speak of authority like nothing can.
But there was no meeting being held, and in my now frequent visits in the past few months, I’d never seen a meeting being held there. Which was good, because I personally didn’t like the idea of being shoved out of a heavily air-conditioned room into the blistering late monsoon heat outside. Perhaps I’ve become soft due to the hours spent in the air-conditioned staff room of the college where I teach. But I very much prefer large air-conditioned rooms for some reason.
The room had one or two students (other than me) when I had arrived, and they soon decided the air-conditioning wasn’t doing them any good. Or they, in their student senses had alerted them against spending too much time in the preserve of the professors. That sense had dulled in me, and so I relaxed myself which going through the letter I needed signed, for the umpteenth time. It was a boring letter, written in a grumpy voice for a grumpy official. My mind wandered, but within the walls of the room.
The room itself was not new. Nay, it was very old, and old to me too. During my days as an undergrad in the erstwhile Presidency College, it had been the central room of the PCR. Just as it was now. The difference then was that the staff room was then a-bustle with the professors, their pets (I mean obsessive students here) and a number of others who were hanging around or working in some way for the professors. There was no central table. Actually there was, but it was practically divided into a number of shifting sections occupied by various student/teacher groups. At any given time, there was a class taking place on one end and a group of students waiting for some attestation on the other. In the corners would sit a number of people who didn’t need the attention of the center, and were engaged I their own work. Others roamed around the central table, careful not to disturb the ongoing class, or stood near the walls, wearing what they felt were appropriate versions of the studious expression.
Teachers and students constantly moved in or out through the two huge doors that adorned the right wall, and the single door that joined the other large room of the PCR to the main one. This second room had been partitioned. Not in the airtight way that cubicles are, but with head-high partitions that you could peek over but knew you shouldn’t. Teachers sat at tables, some chatting, some sipping tea, some getting disturbed by pesky students. Staff moved in an out. A dedicated staffer (I forget his name) had carved a niche for himself and his kettle and stove in a corner of the room, and prepared tea for the teachers on request. He even did so for us students when some large-hearted professor would offer us some.
But there was one thing that stood out more than anything else – light. There was light, lots of it. It shone through the windows, through the huge doors. It fell on tables, books, coffee cups and faces. It lit them up and gave them a warm human glow. It could be the blistering summer or a cool winter afternoon, but the light was always there. Natural, pure, and ever so reminiscent of the days gone by – the days of tall pillars, huge archways and all the natural glow that filtered in through these wide spaces. It set you at ease, made you feel at one with the place and made you want to wait a bit longer. No, there wasn’t any air conditioning. But it didn’t matter, because as students, air conditioning was associated with stuffy offices and stuffier bureaucrats. The PCR wasn’t such a foreboding abode of authority, but a place to seek out answers (get them checked basically!) and discuss them with the professors. And it was all made easier by the light that shone everywhere.
So yeah, it all boiled down to two things – people and light, specifically sunshine. You could flit through the light, between the tables, across the main room and out without anyone bothering to question you. Neither would you question yourself. Because it was all accepted. Imperfect, in so many ways, for you could collide with someone, knock over someone’s food/drink, or simply walk in on an ongoing class and disturb people. But it was all accepted, and that made you feel at ease. Yeah, people and light made you feel at ease.
Sitting that day in the air-conditioned main room didn’t make me feel uneasy. Part of it was because I’m now used to such rooms, and no longer fear them. But part of it was also because the room had a logic of its own now. The windows had been boarded up in the main room. The arranged tables no longer had the same old haphazard arrangement of chairs. They were now all prim and proper, as if waiting on a meeting. The almirahs, with their overflowing answer scripts and files were gone. The walls were now bare, covered only with the forced-upon heritage of black-and-white images. Images of great people, who studied and worked in environments they would today not recognize as belonging to that of the University. They stare down from the walls, trapped where they do not belong, like many of the portraits in the Harry Potter series. They, if anyone, would be feeling unease at what has become of their institution.
All of this gave an impression of a waiting room. In a sense, perhaps it was, since you waited here before moving into one of the chambers dedicated to the professors. Or for some professor to emerge from a chamber and talk to you regarding a certain assignment, term paper or presentation. Like ornate waiting rooms designed to impress the solemn power of the intellectual elite, it asked you to sit and contemplate upon the reality of your position, your task and the person whom you wished to meet. It was supposed to inspire silent awe.
To someone who has seen the same room in an older, less formal time though, it gave off a different vibe. The room was now dark, and could only be lit by some overhanging modernist lamps that neither played with the architecture nor the overall décor. The chairs, the framed pictures, the tables and the darkness all combined with the high ceiling to produce a sepulchral effect. It may have been a Church, and we the faithful waiting for our respective deacons. Nothing – neither the warmth of the sun, nor the chirping of birds, nor the unnecessary movement of staff or students, would disturb this hallowed ground. The air-conditioning suddenly made me feel cold, as if I was in a place that wasn’t part of the biosphere of life.
Beyond the sepulchral waiting room were the catacombs. Stairs and narrow corridors meandered off, flanked by chambers of the deacons. Most of the rooms, at any given time, were empty. Most of the professors, for some reasons unbeknownst to me, were never in their rooms. Nor did their rooms give the semblance of life. They were artificial and cold, as if emphasizing that they, and their occupants, had neither the need nor the patience for the trivialities of life. The imperfections that creep in to make brick and mortar, wood and metal human, were absent. The human touch was yet to permeate, and only the machine existed. To serve, and to impress. But not to love.
And amidst all this, there was no light. No natural, warm sunlight anyway. The fluorescent and the incandescent markers of the machine lit up the hallways. Warmer glows sometimes came from the halogen incandescence of chambers, but these were few and far between. Few of the chambers were blessed with natural light, it is true. But they were rare, and their inhabitants probably equated Vitamin D with melanoma. The result was that the huge hall broke into catacombs of artificial lighting where everything was present, except light and people.
To be honest, a Monday would never tolerate complete vacuum. Students came, stood around like moss that couldn’t take root, and then left. People came and went, and in between, were vast spaces of emptiness. The spaces were shifting, but they were vast. So vast that you could hear your own heartbeat if you listened carefully, and your footsteps echoed like those of a giant. All the while the cold air-conditioning told you that you – as life indeed – wasn’t welcome.
But maybe I exaggerate. Maybe the Monday afternoon just wasn’t the best time to visit this monument to emptiness. But emptiness was woven into the very fabric of the machine that was the PCR now. And like every machine, it would have its own logic. Truly, the logic of the old College PCR, with its many imperfections, was simple. It provided a space for the teachers to sit and rest and study, and gave the students a place where they could consult them if the need arose.
Had that changed ? My mind told me it couldn’t possibly have. After all, the students now coming in had similar needs and intentions. Then why the emptiness? Perhaps it was the need to create distance. Why? Perhaps because it was a university? Universities are meant to be hallowed ground, where the intellectual elite live and work for the betterment of humanity. These are hallowed beings, and they need their space. Like the cloisters of the monks of yore, they need the space of chambers and cubicles to contemplate and study. Students being guided through PhD need to have their discussions without a cacophony of voices all around. Above all, the prestige of the professors demands this space, since they are not meant to jostle with their elbows in the overpopulated country that is India.
Neither are they to be inconvenienced by their colleagues. Each is an island of his/her own, living in a world of study and contemplation which doesn’t need anything beyond the barest human interactions. Collaboration and cooperation would be voluntary, to be initiated as and when two occupants of different chambers decided they wanted to talk or work. It would not be forced on them, for that would ruin the delicate mental equilibria needed for research. Hence, they needed distance from their fellow human beings, and emptiness created this distance.
And it was a permanent distance. You could walk across the emptiness, but you would be swimming in an ocean. One man, or two, or five, cannot break this emptiness. It seeps through the walls, through the windows and the neon lamps. It makes interactions brisk and business-like, cold and calculated. It makes you want to leave after your discussion is done. There is now warmth, no glow and no human chaos to draw you in, nor repel you. Instead, the machine repels you with its very emptiness. Where you have the greatest space is the place where you cannot stay.
But I’ve seen other universities. They did not abhor the light of the sun, nor the contact of human with human. In fact, Calcutta University dumps multiple professors in a single room, and asks them to share computers, shelves and even cooling solutions like fans. Air conditioning is almost absent except in the meeting room. Yet such sharing brings forth banter and chatting, and if you barge in on them, you’d almost inevitably find them having a good laugh amidst mountains of work. Do students stand around as they did in the PCR ? No, but there is no waiting room, nor the need to climb multiple staircases when moving from one professor to another. Going from one end of the hallway to the other pretty much sums up the faculty list, and you can do so while admiring the view of the National Library.
So yes, universities aren’t as open as colleges, and their needs are different. But they don’t have to be cold and artificial areas where human life stands isolated amidst a sea of emptiness. Perhaps they should ideally be – for the reasons outlined above – but they don’t have to be. And when such a change takes place in an area you already know and have grown fond of, it is especially jarring. Whatever the ideal, it is never pleasant to feel isolated and cold in a place you knew was once warm and full of life.
Presently, the isolation broke with one bubble moving quickly through the emptiness. The professor I’d been waiting for had arrived. My reverie shattered, I realized the mundane letter I wanted signed had flown across the room. Quickly retrieving it, I ran after him, up the stairs and across the mezzanine floor. The footsteps were deafening, admonishing me for being too cocky for the empty machine. Minutes later, the letter signed, I was out into the sunlight, the heat, the grime and the cacophony again. And despite the promise of air-conditioning, I didn’t want to go back.