Edition 50

Underwhelmed
Undergraduates
and Where
to Find Them
-Vishesh Kashyap, Editor-in-Chief, 2019-20
August 16, 2010. India is taking on Sri Lanka in the 3rd match of the Triangular Series at Dambulla. Batting
second, India needs one run to win. Virender Sehwag, batting on 99, is on strike. Suraj Randiv bowls a
half-tracker – Sehwag charges down the pitch and smashes it over the long on boundary for six. He
holds his hands aloft and acknowledges the crowd as it cheers India’s win, made sweeter by yet another
century from India’s swashbuckling opener. Except, there is no century. Randiv has bowled a huge no-ball,
awarding the winning run to India before the six was hit. Sehwag remains not-out one run short of his
century, while India wins the match.
That is how the last few months have felt to the Class of 2020. We did manage to complete our studies but
were deprived of experiencing the celebration of our four years at DTU – the final semester. The position of
our choice at the annual batch photograph could never be taken. We never got the opportunity to decide
our plans on each day of the farewell week. Scores of vacations scheduled for the summer could never be
undertaken. All the experiences that could’ve been had, all the choreographed memories that had been
arranged to be made, were replaced by their underwhelming stay-at-home versions. What started as a
welcome reprieve from the hustle of the campus slowly turned into reluctant resignation of our days at
DTU having unceremoniously ended.
A chapter of our English course-book in class 6 was a short story by Ruskin Bond titled ‘The Wish’. The
first line of the chapter went - “Things seldom turn out the way you want them to.” Never has this been
more relevant than in the previous few months. The positivity of the many life lessons we imbibe from this
experience will forever be peppered with the regret of promises not realised and plans not fulfilled.
The longer this period stretches on, the greater grows our longing for the imaginary, yet realistic scenarios
that could’ve been if not for it. The pandemic threw up opportunities for many, but casualties for all, and
has presented us with the uncertainty of our place in the archives. Will we be remembered as the batch
that had it the hardest, or will our resilience fade away into the fog of history as scores of other instances
have? Will things ever be back to normal, or has the very definition of normal been forced to change
through the collective austerity of seven billion people? Is this just a blip in the otherwise linear progression
of our race, or a point there’s no looking back from?
A lot of us might get a chance to complete our century; a lot of us won’t. Perhaps, in the long run, all that
matters is that India was victorious. Or, perhaps, as the hackneyed adage goes, cricket is the real winner.