I am tired now of talking about everything that’s wrong with a young country’s pre-eminent schools, so it is time to move onto something more positive, and, as a byproduct, also explain this memory loss I keep talking about.
One of the first images to surface when you Google certain keywords is a picture of a bed in a student hostel, whose cover is strewn with what can only be 4,000 marijuana joints. These have been made in preparation for something called the “GGP” – let’s call it the “Great Green Pastime”.
On the left-most side of this picture is the “Big Fat Lady”, pastime the size of a newborn baby, which, legend has it, inaugurates the festival. A ten-member committee is in charge of planning and hosting the GGP. Some versions of the legend hold that the sixty-five-year-old professor of introductory statistics goes up on stage with the Big Fat Lady with the kids he once taught.
Over the next three days, the remaining approximately 3,999 pastimes are lit and shared amongst the students and the pass-outs, who grow in number even though no more academic years are completed. The committee has probably rolled a little over and above the public count of pastimes, a quota reserved for them for the time spent on this service.
I’m going to confirm: it was a blast.
It is common enough for a college-goer’s entire personality to be about weed that I think we can skip to the highlights here. Depending on who is listening, and what they are likely to think of me, I might include that I have been part of such committees. (I could’ve been elected head of the committee, you know. But hopefully my professional successes through and since then reassures everyone of my extremely high calibre and competence.)
At the time, I wasn’t aware that this effortless-highachieving-party-girl-persona was borne of a desperate need to collapse the “bad” and the “good” onto each other, to prove that nothing is as it’s made to seem through my very way of life.
Intense, I know.
But what I thought was a benign tranquilliser that helped me study and bear social anxiety was also easy to abuse; it numbed my feelings entirely, so that I could ignore my nervous system and continue running on the hamster wheel I needed to run to survive.
Think about the word too. Stoned. You can do anything to a stone. You can use them to create fires. You can lay roads, build things. You can throw it somewhere and nothing will happen to it. It won’t feel a thing. On its own, it’s inert, immobile, incapable of action.
You get stoned.
Like so much of my personality that I thought was irrevocably unique and edgy of me, I was sad to discover that a mid-to-late-twenties dependence on pot was not only unhealthy but also unoriginal as fuck. And it was characteristic of my generation for the same reasons as mine! In her essay about India’s competitive exams, Gopalan describes a friend who went to study at Kota. “She was surrounded by people involved in self-destruction. The drug scene on campus was vibrant and diverse. She would talk about thirteen-year-olds snorting cocaine at a joint on campus because what else were they going to do? They were people who had been stopped from happening, trapped in the abyss of a twisted version of ‘real life’.”
“Stopped from happening.”
It really does not behove a writer to plug so many of her own pieces in her own book, but such are the evermore self-involved times we live in. In a VICE piece on how technology is shaping the drugs market in India, I mention that the number of drug users has gone up 70 per cent in the last decade, a rise that the law enforcement attributes to increasing westernisation and declining traditional social control, and a need for instant gratification brought about by technology and social media. All this is true.
But a book called Stoned, Shamed, and Depressed, “an explosive account of the secret lives of India’s teens,” confirms my theories: in the book, Jyotsna Bhargava writes about “Rock N Roll Generation 2.0”, and how India’s urban teenagers resort to drugs to make studies bearable, to fill a parental or emotional void, or, to remain socially connected for the “cursed overachiever”, or to ‘rebel against an extremely strict upbringing’. Embarrassingly me. But these kids started in school, much before I did, because of how available things are today. The latest is mephedrone or “meow meow”, especially popular with 12-year-olds; it is ingested by sniffing and leaves no smell, lasting about 45 minutes to a couple of hours, which means it suitable for undetected use at school, in tuitions, or at friend’s places.
New-age Indian television that captures such Delhi youth life induces FOMO in me because the kind of adolescent I was would have thrived there. The 2023 web series Class, in particular, depicts the vagaries of interwoven distractions that children are mired in today, from drugs and casual relationships to increasing westernisation and declining traditional social control, the pressures of performing your best self on social media, while grappling with mental health and dysfunctional families and intergenerational trauma, whether by collecting achievements or posing as generally aware or “woke”, which holds that the issues that divide our society have a right answer.
To wit: for the privileged, awareness, followed by shame, guilt, and online performances of morality are a chase to what they have inherited. But according to the identity politics framework, the final judge and gatekeeper of morality is the province of oppressed identities. Once a “Privileged” has become alert to how their identities have helped them at the cost of others, rightful redressal should take the form of whatever an “Oppressed” defines, whether it is changing the language you use, or being in favour of meat-eating, or excusing their own narcissism, or their hatefulness towards those who deviate from these right behaviours. Those we do are “problematic”, “hypocritical”, “morally bankrupt”, and so on.
Excerpted with permission from Famous Last Questions: A Confused Woman’s Investigations into the Country that Shaped Her, Sanjana Ramachandran, Aleph Book Company.
