The Myths, the Fads and the Frat Boys

Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

Well, sure. Um ... but perhaps not the whole truth, if that's quite alright with you.

The whole truth. We insist.

Ahem, the characters had better be renamed, then, if we're going to pull this off. And the scenes will have to be tweaked just that little bit. You know, to maintain the anonymity - or at least the idea of anonymity, which the esteemed jury will admit serves the selfsame purpose.



Let the lights be dimmed until the eyes start to go very wide ... Ah, this chhajja will do just fine. After all, if the aura and hype are to be examined, it has to be done piecemeal.

Suit yourself.

And so it begins. Let us then be judged and damned in your eyes alone.


Part the First

The scene takes place in the Land of Cool, the wild wild west of India, in the butt-shaped state or thereabouts. All things of consequence happen here, and here alone - in this elitist brick fortress. There are no damsels in distress here, just four hundred knights in shining armour, bursting to get some action. Even if it means trampling upon a few of their own.

WIMWI - the eye of the media, the hungry tabloids, who like dogs grab at the bones thrown at them. But the bones have long been stripped of flesh and juice. We, then, will provide what they can not.

We are WIMWI's torch of truth, its champion of free speech. You know how every choir has that one reedy voice, loud and broken, which finishes the song two lines too late, and out of tune? It is a voice that rings clear and harsh, the sort that makes you wince. Twice. We are happy to bring you that voice.

Most stories have a beginning and a semblance of an end. The beginning of ours is perhaps the one thing we shall never reveal. And this tale has no end, either - it's a perpetual cycle, a tragic wheel of time. The story of Con if you are Able, repeating ceaselessly with each new batch.

To jump straight to the middle, then, and don't ask yourself how you got here. After all, why end a dream if you have to wake up to a reality as horrible as this?

It is a dry and dusty night, as most nights here are doomed to be, and the night spells a giant T.

T-Nite

Where does one even begin with this charade? Talent Nite (sic) is how it reads and perhaps once upon a time, it was as innocuous as that.

Well, we could start with two weeks ago, when the sections are first told of its gravity. Gravity, somebody once said, is the ballast of the soul. But build a tower out of ballast and voila! - you shall have your Babel. Welcome to Hype-101, the tool-kit you need to survive this hell.

Ex-CRs (class representatives) and cronies begin with their memories - oh, those mellow memories! - telling the new and gullible fachchas (freshmen) of the world and how it spins:

The next few sleepless nights, these Wise Ones say, will come to define your existence, your machismo and your social circle for the next two years. Friends will be made bending over these poster-scapes, bonds far stronger than the glue that will soon plaster those mess walls.

Huddling together in a confused delirium, they'll scream at the top of their lungs, drowning out the clangs of mess cutlery with their chants - oh, the poetry! - and chest-thumping. All around: slogans that make one cringe, tag-lines from the land of lame and T-shirts that could never again be worn in public.

People meeting decades from now, the Wise Ones say, will remember these three nights of T - oh, so much T! - and how they slugged it out to be the best and the boldest randomly chosen of ninety amateurs amongst a suit of five.

Truth be told, and it's not often it's told, the whole affair is nothing more than a circus act - a performance of song and dance and frivolity - to sit back and enjoy, designed to entertain the voyeuristic veterans. It is forgotten all at once - and never spoken of again. No, not even at those alumni dinners. Things go back to the way they were, the upstarts return to their quiet class-naps, the posters are torn down, hell freezes over, and the dorm-sweeps acquire a new, abecedarian wardrobe.

A Day at the Races - oh, what races!
Blindfolded he runs.
Crash! Blindfolded he falls.
A scar, a martyr, Harry Potter.
Eh, the rhyme is lame, but so's the game.

T-Nite is, we postulate, a self-selection process. Our very own Lord of the Flies. In the end, another ticket to a club, one of many that form on campus. Those who can suffer the ignominy and the embarrassment - who are impervious to the inanity - they are the last ones left standing. And like all who have gone through hell together, they are branded, marked for life, and sentenced to each others' company. Winning scarcely matters - unless you win, of course - and the important thing is that you've done ... something. We try very hard not to think of what exactly we did. If somebody asked us, we would be hard pressed to explain. And that's what makes us special, isn't it? How seriously we took the whole charade, how seriously we tried, and still try, to be taken seriously...