AT THE THRESHOLD

Summer vacations generally are welcomed by school students as the stress buster from the montonous schedule of going to school, tuitions, playground in a time-bound

manner. College students eye over this break as a time that creates place for everything to be done in the world, say, internships, summer jobs, recreational activities, tutorials for various competitions, honing skills in extra curriculars and sports and so on.

But there is a greater melodrama to this, as the story unfolds. Students who appear for class XII exams have to first meticulously strive to do well (oops! The “best”) in board exams irrespective of their forte and their ability. It has to be then suceeded by joining some crash courses or going through the regular vicious cycles of self-studies several times in a day. The preperations of all such entrance exams are surely met by the exam dates for the students. Cramming up of formulae, theorems, are followed by mugging up of the entire chapters and rote learning of mathematical problems.

Finally when these entrance exams bid adieu, CBSE and other state boards announce the results! Let me just enlighten you by one “fact-of -the-matter” : No matter what you’ve scored in your board exams you’ll get that droplet of sweat rolling down your cheeks atleast momentarily while filling up forms, standing in never-ending queues on the admission days in University Of Delhi.

Almost every student enrolling for an undergraduate degree aspires to be the part of the most coveted university of the nation: DU, sharing the stage space only with the IITs. Clearing your entrance exams definitely falls in your to-do list but DU remains the chart toppers for all courses that it offers except B.Tech. Besides this one course, DU is considered as the premiere institute of the nation by students and professionals alike for all courses.

So pretty obviously, DU opens no easy entrance doors for any student. Forget about an SRCC doing a 100% cut-off while releasing the cut-off lists, even an RLA does the same. The days while applying for admissions in DU are and will always be uneasy both for students and parents alike. Early morning wake-ups for newspapers, or late night internet searches are followed by choosing the college that should be visited first in case, you score good enough to get admitted to a few colleges in the first cutoff only. At times, bigger shocks await you inside the college premises. For example, the college will come up with additional eligibility criteria and will inform you only when you get there for mark-sheet verifications; hence, wasting your too precious time that could have been utilized by heading towards another college where you would have atleast procured a seat, since the time bound admission days open up only for 3-4 hours in a day and only continue for 2-3 days after the cutoff list is released.

Those regular tiring days under the sun, those drives from one college in north Delhi to the one in South from my house located in West Delhi can never turn oblivious to me, atleast. Those sprints that my parents and I made in haste, in various college campuses seeking for someone to resolve our queries, to lend a helping hand…urghh.

But you know, what’s the best part going to be?.. when you’ll get admitted to any of the college of DU, you’ll exclaim in your hearts of hearts “Aaaaahhhh….It was all worth it!”.

You might have migrated from chennai, assam, mumbai, kashmir and so many other and most likely all the states, to get admitted in DU. DU takes away the cream of the nation, almost all the toppers are within its reach. So, I was saying that you’ll exclaim those tiring efforts..yes! You will.

From the innumerable societies such as dance, drama, music, photography, poetry, fashion to joining NCC, NSS or taking up sports from shooting to swimming to lawn tennis, you’ll receive a delicious platter in the very opening and the beginning of your college life. If this isn’t enough, you can try your hands-on experiences such as working in a media house, NGO and many more. I doubt if any other university will offer you with so many opportuinities and co-operation just like DU does.

Then, comes the University’s election time; when you can have a lot of free movies, lunches, trips to amusement parks and so on;) . The elections are grand and real, for your information! You’ll spot candidates and their supporters indulging in physical violence, marching rallies and immense patrolling on the polling days.

The election feast is followed by the Annual Fest Season of DU in all the colleges. One can witness the cast and crew of several upcoming movies in colleges at that time. The star nights are the highlights of the fests. They are humongous carnivals in the entire university. The campus life, hostel life and the almost daily Delhi trips are breathtaking, backbreaking, swashbuckling and spinescent simultaneously.

You are even taken to various field trips, leisure trips and day trips to let yourselves enjoy. The innumerable workshops, orientations from professionals and from the elite panel of international universities is also extremely informative and it opens floodgates for several students to make wise planning for their career. The campus placement cell of DU is also an incredible launching pad for all the students of DU. Top MNCs target DU students to be hired as an employee..DU becomes like a brand name for you to soar high!

Hence, the platter is hot and mouth watering.. and I’ll repeat myself..”those tiring days are all worth it!”. Being a DUite is a matter of pride and the coolest identity as a teenager you can carry about when it comes to flaunting your institute’s name!

IPL : IMPREGNABLE PRODIGIES LEAGUE

Momentarily, let’s all of us make ourselves oblivious of what the IPL is generally tagged with: showbiz, glamour, cheergirls, Siddharth Mallya-Deepika Padukone liplock, sreesanth-harbhajan slapgate, ShahRukh’s somersaults, preity’s loud cheer for her team, pollard-starc ugly spat, Sir Sunil Gavaskar bowing down to the master blaster, England’s ace woman cricketer Isa Guha being coveted as a superstar in India, sponsorships, broadcasting rights, multimedia partners, hotel industry, travel(airline) industry, after night parties, fashion world’s events, franchise owners with heavy purses during the auctions, electronic and print media, housepacked stands in the stadia, Ness-Preity’s relationship status, Shoaib and Sidhu raising their hands for the same team in the studio unlike their playing days, Shilpa-kundra marital journey parallel to the IPL, match fixing scandals and so many more.

Critics stress upon the uninevitable glamour quotient in the IPL, coronating themselves as the cricket aficionados of the ‘purest’ form: test cricket. To all such people out there, I would love to vociferate that the ‘purest’ form of cricket was way back in the seventeenth century in England, when women used to play in hoopla skirts bowling under-arm. After that, all that took over were the transformations in the game.

IPL was inaugurated in 2008. During the same period Zee network’s “Indian Cricket League” was operational. It was an enormous success. The annual tournament, played mostly in Indian summer has gone from strength to strength and is largely viewed as being the ‘richest’ tournament in world cricket.

Until 2012, the Indian Premier League was sponsored by DLF after they paid $50 million for the five-year sponsorship. Pepsi took over the contract for the 2013 IPL after paying close to $72 million for the 5-year contract.

Let’s take a sneek peak at the ‘goodie-goods’ of cricket, now. Every national cricket board in the world wants to incessantly face one problem while selecting its team and that is the problem of plenty. IPL sets the podium for even that. Sunil Narine (for Kolkota Knight Riders) burst onto the global scene when he set the stage on fire in the IPL. After numerous quarrels between the West Indies Cricket Board and Chris Gayle, it were the giant man’s bludgeoning knocks in the IPL (for Royal Challangers Bangalore), that set the path for his entry back to the national team. Azhar Mahmood (from pakistani origin) was drafted onto international cricket arena via IPL(for Kings XI Punjab). Shane Warne, Ricky Ponting, Rahul Dravid, Lasith Malinga (from tests) are few of the great cricketing legends who after calling it quits from the national duty continued to stay in action in the IPL. This is viewed by people with a raised eyebrow round the world as betrayal and insincerity towards one’s own nation citing the greed of money from the cash-rich tournament as the prime reason. The IPL contract vows to pay all its players the entire sum of match fees if the player is available for five matches in one season. So, if it just would have been that greed then all players would have packed their bags and left after the first five league stage matches. So, inevitably there’s something more to it which the spectator isn’t able to speculate. When a Sunil Narine confronts of missing a Test match for his nation just to be the part of deja vu of being champions in IPL, Lasith Malinga announces his retirement from test cricket when the Sri Lankan board stresses upon calling him for playing tests amidst the IPL, ICC sits down to chart out a window for the IPL in the international calendar of cricketing tours and such schedules, Sir Sachin Tendulkar plays in the IPL after retiring from T20Is; then, the human mind should work towards convincing oneself that the mind is unaware and unknown of the aware and the known (by facts… I mean the latent meaning of those facts).

No where in the world one could have seen the coming together of Andrew Symonds and Harbhajan Singh in IPL after the monkeygate in 2008. Its often pressed upon that IPL should not be eyed by the capped players as a platform for staging comebacks in their national teams keeping at bay the other domestic tournaments, but the intellect betrays the eyes. Robin Uthappa, Gautam Gambhir, Chris Gayle, Pat Cummins, Wayne Parnell are to name a few.

The double round-robin format of the tournament is followed by the knockout stage to witness the triumphant team. Besides, all the international players who are mentioned above and some not, IPL does a world of good to the domestic uncapped players. From Paul Valthaty’s euphoric century which made the world witness an Adam Gilchrist as a second fiddle to him, to my personal favourite Pravin Tambe’s blitzkreig hat-trick who arrived onto the IPL stage at the age of 41, this emergence of domestic talent is the biggest withdrawal for me from the game and for many more Indians like me.

A young prodigious Sanju Samson or a Manan Vohra, is a delight to just sit back and watch and exclaim “future is safe now!”. Axar Patel has been stupendous this season, so has been Mohd. Shami, Umesh Yadav and many more, leaving the Indian think tank with aproblem they would love to face perenially and that is the “problem of plenty’.

Yusuf Pathan’s belligerent 37 ball 100, Amit Mishra’s and Yuvraj Singh’s dual hat-tricks have been exemplary finds from all seasons who have stumped the critics responding with the straight bat simultaneously.

Hence, the tournament is a league for impregnable prodigies.