At last I am a certified bachelor.

No, I don’t mean that I have found the girl of my dreams and am out to prove that I am marriage-worthy, nor do I mean that the government has started handing out certificates proving that people are indeed bachelors (similar to the ‘certificate of joblessness’ that we all received before the campus interviews, to prevent people getting two jobs, while others didn’t have one!).

What I mean is that I went over to my University yesterday and received my degree certificate proclaiming that I was a Bachelor of Electronics and Tele-Communication Engineering from Jadavpur University.

I didn’t expect to get the certificate in one attempt (one attempt to collect it from the examination office that is). We are here speaking of Jadavpur University, famous for its enviable abilities of making any ten-minute official work take one week at the least. When I started out in the morning, I told my parents, I should get the certificate by friday. I had to because I am going back to Bangalore next week.

I reached the JU administrative (Aurobindo Bhavan) at around twelve thirty. Without any prior experience of collecting degree certificates, I was at a loss about whom to approach about it. But I quickly made up my mind and entered the outer office of the Assistant Controller of Examinations. A friendly clerk asked my what the hell I was doing there. I told him. He gently informed me that I had come to the wrong place, and I should take a form from ‘that’ counter (he pointed it out to me), pay the fees, and take with some ‘madam’ (I didn’t get the name) in the examinations office.

So I walked over to the counter. There was a small queue of about nine, ten guys and girls, collecting the exam forms. (Ya, we had to fill u forms and pay some fees to be eligible to sit for the exams.) The old man sitting at the counter slowly dealt with each person, elaborately studying the fee-books that they had to present, laboriously picking up the forms, putting n number of stamps here and there, before handing out the forms. My turn came in about half an hour, and the person in the counter gave me a white form and told me to hurry to the cash counters before they were closed.

I glanced at my watch. It was fifteen minutes past one. The counter closed at two. I quickly made my way to stand in the cash queue behind thirty odd students, who conscientiously did their pre-exam duty much ahead of the semester exams. We usually did it in the last week, when the queues consisted of about a couple of hundred students, and we ‘had to’ bunk a couple of lectures to be eligible to write the exams, answering questions on the same topics that were discussed in the classes we had to bunk! Anyway, when I was nearing the counter, in another fifteen minutes time that is, the cashier declared that the counter was closed for newcomers. He quickly collected all the forms from those who were already in the queue, did the necessary paper work, called out names one by one, and gave away the receipts. When my turn came, he suddenly decided that I was getting away too easily, and conjured up a new form for me to fill. Ultimately I was the last person to be served in that counter yesterday, and at two o’clock I jubilantly emerged from the counters holding a half-filled form and a receipt.

I made my way towards the examination office incredulously, finding it rather hard to believe that I had finished all the paper work already, it was only two! I couldn’t find madam X at her seats, and asked the person sitting at the next table what I should do. At this point of time, a large procession of JU staff members came marching down the corridor carrying red flags and chanting slogans. Suddenly I started feeling rather nostalgic. What was JU, I thought, without all these slogans and protests and hunger strikes! Madam X’s friend, who had been looking at the form for the whole length of time while these protestants were protesting against god knows what! As they made their way back to from where they were coming, this guy informed me that madam X was among those in the procession, and can be expected back at her seat sometime in the afternoon. However, he informed me that I needed to go to the Muster Roll section and get a signature verifying that I indeed lived where I claimed to, first.

The KMR section is on the second floor of a different building. As I made my way to this new destination, I saw that several of those protestants had spread out mattresses on the corridor and were sitting down, chatting with each other. I came to know that they were demanding pay hike.

The doors of the KMR section were closed when I came there. I peered in through a window and spotted a white haired old man sitting nearby, eating rice and vegetables from a tiffin-carrier. I showed him my form and asked him what I should do about it. He told me that it was mid-day break, and I would have to come back after three.

When I came back at three, after having met my professors and juniors, and having told each and every one of them individually, why I had cut my hair so short (hair-cuts are too costly in Bangalore to indulge in very often, specially compared to Calcutta!) I found that the KMR section was empty. Or at least it appeared empty in the first glance. Looking carefully for the second time, I perceived a young man sitting in a corner and reading the newspaper. I approached him, and expressed my desire to get the signature in the form. He looked at me over his thin reading glasses and told me, nothing doing, no one was around, and he was not going to go through the record books and verify my address. He asked me to come back at six. I meekly told him that I had a rather busy schedule (when you come home for one week, you will be lucky if you get even one relatives-free hour that you can enjoy with your family or alone.) He looked me over once and then said, “Come tomorrow”. I lied that I was going back to Bangalore today. Grumbling, he stood up, elaborately folded the newspaper, and ambled towards a desk which had a lot of fat registers, muttering to himself all the time “Why do these blokes need the certificates!” and so on. After half an hours diligent digging, he ultimately unearthed the desired book from under a huge pile, and opened it. He took a look at the address recorded, and comparing it with that on the form, declared, “You have given the wrong address!” It took me another half an hour to convince him that I did actually live where I said, and someone must have made a mistake in recording it in his books. Ultimately he put his signature on the piece of paper, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

I came back to the exams office. Madam X was still not there. The guy at the next table took the form, and told me, “Now go and get a signature from your HOD, that you are indeed from the Dept you claim to be from.” Now, why he couldn’t have told me earlier, I do not know, but I again trudged back to my Department building to find that the professor was not in his office. “He has come I the morning, but I do not know where he is right now.” The guy sitting outside told me. I made another round of the building, not to find him anywhere. Everyone I met seemed to have seen him sometime in the morning, somewhere or other, but no one knew where he was now. Ultimately, I cornered the great man sneaking into a lift, no doubt with an intention to elude me, so that I again had to come next day.

I had to wait only another half an hour before Madam X emerged from a ‘meeting’ with the controller of examinations regarding some lost files, before I could approach her with a filled form demanding that I be given my degree certificates. She asked me to sign at some ten or twelve different places agreeing to all kinds of things regarding my birth, education, upbringing and what not. Then she opened a steel wardrobe and ultimately handed me the coveted treasure.

I came home triumphantly, gloating about my victories of the day…after all I was now a certified bachelor.