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Miss Fresher's Night by Subroto

Mukerji

Men are given to celebration; they love spectacle,

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

Heathens danced around the Maypole or offered

human sacrifices to Baal. The Greeks answered with their
Olympic 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 organizing
extravagantly-overdone Bacchanalian revels and veiled Vestal
virgins. Miss Freshers Night is Stephanias unique response.

I use the present tense because I havent bothered

to check whether the event that marked the peak as well as
the culmination of ragging, has managed to survive to the
present day. Probably not, forhorror of horrorsthere are
now real, live females in Stephania1in residence, to boot!

Who, and under the evil influence of what, allowed

this miscarriage of democracy to come about, I do not know nor
do I care to find out. Post mortems do not interest me
particularly. All I know is that sacrilege has been perpetrated.
No more will the likes of Jainder Singh or Jitu Gohain crawl out of
bed after a nights revels and stagger to breakfast just in time
to beat the 9.00 AM deadline.

No one cared to remark on their grumpiness, their

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

Incidentally, Jainders room was a true work of

spontaneous 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 Texas

tornado that had sucked up books, old newspapers, notes,
tutorials, back issues of Playboy, sundry items of attire and
toilet articles, and, after mixing them thoroughly, had scattered
them in surreal, knee-deep, wall-to-wall confusion. Such
wonders will have passed forever from the sight of men, for
females have overrun the last frontier. Stephania will never be
the same again.RIP.

All this foregoing is, naturally, part and parcel of my

argument as to why the memory of the original annual Miss
Freshers Contest is even more meaningful from a historical
point of view. With so many misses joining as freshmen (which
paradox makes the muddle all the more hideous), how could
there be a Miss Fresher? There would have to be a Master
Fresher as well, a title hardly euphonic or even logical, a
ridiculous exercise in futility. Nevertheless, let us return to the
golden days when men were men, and the only sex (barring a
few notable exceptions: see Stephania or Bust!) resident in
College.

Now, given Mans propensity for celebrating at the

drop of a brasorry, hat (see how rattled I am with all this
females-in-College bit), the Miss Freshers Annual Contest was a
BIG 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 an
active rolewere cosmetically metamorphosed for a night into
ersatz women and pitted against each other for the title.

Rules of the arena were followed; thumbs down

meant 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 the
whole 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, matchd

with mine,
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine---
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A panel of seniors whittled the field down to about

ten 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-up

men practiced feverishly, while certain light-fingered fellows
were commissioned as cosmetics and accessories suppliers.
Sisters, mothers, and even girlfriends must have complained
bitterly about choice goodies that mysteriously vanished
overnight from vanity cases and lingerie drawers.

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

Combination Rooma classic bit of convoluted nomenclature so
typical of Stephania). It was, as its name deliciously hints, the
recreation room. It had a music room equipped with a state-of-
the-art stereo record player-amplifier-speaker system, ably
supported by about three dozen or so LPs (which meant Long
Playing records, designed to be played on a turn-table set to
rotate at 33 RPM (revolutions per minute). There were
caroms, and a table-tennis table that saw a lot of action. And
there was the television set.

In the early sixties, television was a novelty. In The

Beginning was Doordarshan (a single channel, thankfully),
which dished out sundry garbage for viewers to take or to
leave; a monopoly, I believe its called. Im sure that, for most
people, ownership of a TV set was a just a personal statement,
more of a status symbol than a real source of entertainment or
enlightenment. (some things never change---it still is, only the
sets grow more sophisticated with each passing year, with
manufacturers adding a plethora of features in competitive
desperation, features that few users either need or know how to
use).

DDs signature tune gave me the creeps, as it still

does. Imagination has never been DDs strong point. Creativity
was an optional extraa novelty discouraged in a State-
sponsored outfit. Images were fuzzy, studio subjects poorly lit
and 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 was
deeply thankful that the event was not being recorded for
telecast.

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 novo cognoscenti,
the new breed of TV couch potatoes. If white failed to appear at
times, no one complained; one doesnt look a gift horse in the
mouth, does one? It speaks volumes for the human penchant
for novelty, that large numbers of the image-hungry (and
image-conscious, too, it may be said) residents sat around the
set, steadily devouring the miasma it spewed forth.

My life-long aversion to The News, going back to the

early days of valve radio-sets, was given a fresh lease of life by
a fiendish variation devised by DD to torture a captive
audience. 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 global
happenings called Mirror of the World, anchored by Prakash
Mirchandani. He was succeeded by Kabir Bedi, who did an
equally splendid job.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Kabir in College. He

was a Sherwoodian two years my senior, a serious, intellectual
type with a physique like that of a Greek God who did his bit on
the sports field with determination if not always with distinction.
His mind seemed to be on higher things, even then. The Gods
had smiled on Kabir, blessing him with the amazing good looks
and boyish charm that remain with him till today.
He accepted the rare gift of manly beauty graciously
if somewhat absent-mindedly, never really conscious of it or
hamstrung by it. He was, and is in essence, a person of the
spirit. He really is, believe me! His many marriages and
umpteen relationships are only indications that he is searching,
searchingone day, like his medieval namesake, I'm sure he'll
find what he's looking for.
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It was all the more galling for me to find that in his

final year, I had, by some unlucky fluke, equaled his marks in
the senior school General Knowledge examination. To make
matters worse, my being two years his junior meant I got two
grace 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 long

time after this. He was unfazed; prizes mattered little to him. He
was after Life itself, and the Grand Prize it awards its devotees.
As we all know, he got itafter Sandokan, he never looked
back. No one ever deserved success more, especially because it
did not spoil him; it simply added even more depth and texture
to what was already a masterpiece.

It is said of Paul Baumer that he fell on a day that

was so sleepily uneventful that, in dispatches, it was tersely
dismissed as being All Quiet On The Western Front.2 Miss
Freshers day could have matched Paul Baumers last one,
dispatch for dispatch: till darkness fell, that is. Then all hell
broke loose, as they say in Westerns. In the music room,
temporarily converted into a field greenroom, the contestants
were being readied by their trainers and make-up artists to
charm the yelling, stamping, savages outside.

Bets flew thick and fast as to whose horse would

win, for each contestant had a sponsor. Bottles of war paint
were all over the place. Lipstick of all the garish shades possible
to imagine were being thickly coated on lips, and eye shadow
seemed to be in more in vogue in Stephania than in the pages
of Vogue itself.
As wethe miserable few qualified for this
particularly testing ordeal for reasons beyond our controlwere
being readied for the ramp, the restive hooligans outside raised
a clamour fit to raise the dead.

Even through the haze of misery that seemed to

envelope me (for I was, and have always been, staunchly
hetero in my inclinationsdrag was abhorrent to me), I seem to
remember that I refused to have my legs shaved.

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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 his

legs, but I was no transvestite. I resisted strongly; so strongly,
in fact, that my sponsor backed off: a last-minute substitute
was impossible to arrange.

And so it was that I walked the ramp (I felt I was

walking the plank) in a grass skirt, stuffed bra, and Hawaiian
slippers. I was meant to sashay down the catwalk doing the
hula.

Unshaved legs under grass skirts are hardly the stuff

that turns a crowd on. When the legs do the Camels Walk (for
some unknown reason, this came to me naturally), and hips
gyrate Elvis Presley fashion, boos and jeers are but natural.

A somewhat prominent set of trapezius and triceps

muscles, followed by a rippling six-pack (legacy of Sherwood
gym-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 of
ovation? 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 the

disappointed hooligans gave me the bird in no uncertain
fashion. Boos and hoarse cries of thwarted passion rebounded
from the rafters; I was hastily recalled by those in event
management. In the ultimate analysis, natural talent will always
win 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, and
walked with a lissome grace that must have given many a
Mirandian a complex. The crowd went wildand the title was
his. (Even today, he is a very handsome man. Age has bypassed
him, but not fame, and his thick, black hair is as lustrous as
ever.

This extraordinarily intelligent and attractive man

dominates the countrys cultural scene, a highly creative artist
and visionary and Indias globe-trotting cultural ambassador.
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Rajnioops! I mean Rajiv, Indias peripatetic culture czar, has

countless friends among the Bold and the Beautiful of the world,
one of them being his long-time chum Bianca Jagger). And to
think that we endured history lectures together, breathing the
same air and yawning at the same lousy jokes! What strange
bedfellows doth Fate bring together !

Subroto Mukerji